When you're making a LFS movie and you have huge avi screen capture files from Fraps or whatever, do you compress them before starting work on them, or do you leave them as they are and only export them when you've finished the movie?

Also, if you're working with smaller files will it make your movie maker run faster?

Keep your files full size throughout the editing, and only reduce in size or compress them during the final render. You'll end up with higher overall quality than if you work with pre-compressed files.

I recommend to compress them with the editing software AFTER you have done making your movie

Quote from squidhead :

..compress them with the editing software..

I would not recommend compressing with the editing software, since they (often) lack rendering options and thus making the video look horrible. I would recommend saving the final movie _uncompressed_, and compressing it with an external software, like virtualdub.

Keep your Raw files uncompressed to keep the quality.

compressing them and then compressing the full movie will only lose its quality ...

Quote from pine-fin :

I would not recommend compressing with the editing software, since they (often) lack rendering options and thus making the video look horrible. I would recommend saving the final movie _uncompressed_, and compressing it with an external software, like virtualdub.

so basically what you offer is to get your 50 (example) gigs of raw video into your editing software, then render that as a uncompressed movie getting a big fat (possibly 50+gigabyte) video file, and then compress it with a codec in external software instead of using the same codec in the editor?

Yep, atleast premiere does a horrible job in converting to divx, thats why I said it. If converting straight in the editor works for you then of course you should do it your way

Thanks guys, I was getting a little concerned that my two partitions of my HD were getting quite full. I'll just have to do some spring cleaning!

Quote from pine-fin :

Yep, atleast premiere does a horrible job in converting to divx, thats why I said it. If converting straight in the editor works for you then of course you should do it your way

the reason Im shocked is that Veagas uses exactly same codecs to compress the avi file as the videodub...
Premiere does a decent job if you get to poke around in the settins, trust me

Of course they use the same codecs, duh I meant editors may lack the settings you are trying to poke around, astra didnt say what editor he was using. I stopped using premieres rendering because for some reason, it doesnt look as good as virtualdub render