The Intermediate and Delivery Video Formats

When you work with video content, it is extremely important to understand the difference between Intermediate Formats (Footage that is used for editing purpose) and Delivery Formats (The final version of the video that is shared with everyone). If you don’t use the proper output/codec, you will be degrading your work and have unwanted results. Let me give you a rundown about the two different video formats.

Intermediate
This format is the one you want to work with when your montage is note completed. This is the main format that will be used when you need to switch from one application to another, without any lose of quality. It is important to understand that in order to work with proper footage material, on your timeline, you need a lossless codec. What is a lossless codec you ask? It’s the main source video material that has not been compressed, normally, a pretty huge file.

Among these codecs are: Cineform, Lagarith, Huffyuv, Intel Cinepack, Apple Intermediate Format, plain uncompressed and lots more.

Even if these codecs create huge files, it will be to your advantage, because your video will not lose quality. Let’s say for example you have some green screen footage that you have just finished editing. All the cuts are fine and now you want to export it so you can use an alternative software, like After Effects, to remove the green screen. If your edited footage is exported with a compressed codec, you will have one hell of time removing that green screen, because of the compression.

Now there is a little tricky part with HDV footage. If you import your footage with HDVSplit, you will notice that your footage has a MPEG2 (.m2t) compression. This is not a lossless codec, but a lossy codec. If you plan on using multiple video softwares to create your final video, you might want to watch out. If you export your video in MPEG2, because you go from one software to another, your video will lose quality. The trick with MPEG2 is to never export/compress it when switching softwares. As far as I know, this works with the Adobe suite. You import your .m2t file in Adobe Premiere Pro. You make all your editing in it. Once you want to add some post production, color correction and effects to your video, you import you Premiere project file in After Effects. If I am not mistaken, starting CS3, this id doable. This method eliminates the need to compress your video, before its finished.

Delivery
Once your video is done and looks as you wish, it’s time to export it so everyone can see your wonderful work. You want to be able to compress it as much as needed, this way it is easily transferable over the web (I don’t think your friend wants a 20GB video…) or on a media (CD/DVD), without too much degrading the quality.

The most common lossy codecs used: H.264, JPG Sequence, Divx/XVid, WMV, MPEG2, and FLV. Many more exist!

These formats compress very well, each with its advantages, but will never look as good as your original lossless footage. This shouldn’t be a problem, because most common user can’t see the difference and having a smaller file size, it will greatly improve playback (so even your grandma’s computer can play it).

To make it easier for everyone, here is a golden rule:
Export lossless formats as much as you need to complete your work, but only export in lossy delivery format once!

Some final words
.avi and .mov are not codec formats, but container formats. People should really start understanding this. It kills me when people say: “the avi codec isn’t good”. By just looking at the file name, it’s impossible to say what codec it holds. It’s for this reason that it is possible to have DivX or Cineforme .avi files, and for the same reason a media player can play one .avi format but not another .avi. Your player needs the proper codec to read the file. The same goes for .mov, .mp4, .mkv and other contain formats.

Finally, some older codec versions (yes things can get more complicated, because some codecs have different versions..), might only work on PCs or Macs. For maximum compatibility, use Cineform.