MPEG
Since I do use Premiere I thoutgh I jump in.
JPEG was designed to compress still photos. M-JEPG is a reworked version of
plain JPEG that is to compress movies. MPEG was only designed to compress
movies. MPEG can make very small files but is limited to VHS quality pictures.
M-JPEG can come close to D2 quality if you have a board that will work at 3:1
compression. If your going to compress animation for output I suggest a M-JPEG
board with at least a max compression ratio of 7:1 to 9:1. The board that I
have maxs at 16:1, The picture from captured video looks fine. But compressing
sharper still frames causes artifacts to show up in the video. The advantage to
M-JPEG over MPEG is that M-JPEG is easy to edit. MPEG is very dificalt to cut
and splice because of the way the video is compressed.
The number of colors depends on the Codec(Copression Code) that you use M-JPEG
codecs that come with the boards will be 24 bit. The codecs CINEPAC and INDEO
that come with video for windows are also 24 bit. the rest are 16 – 8 bit
codecs. CinePac can compress full-screen, full-motion video but you'd probably
the fastest DEC Alpha to play it back smothly.
Bill "Axoid" Rockhold