Loss?

[Alumnus]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what does lossless mean?

[Nya-chan Production]

It means that there was no quality loss in the transcription of the image and you can fully reproduce it.

As you surely know, the video is really just a set of images and those are a set of data. You can save some size by using methods which approximate parts of images, but you lose quality and once you do, you can never go back and reproduce the original.

[Alumnus]

So like.. you download an episode. - Lossless.

You edit and add effects - loss?

So then the render has loss?

[Enigma]

Lossless compression, as the name implies, means that after compressing the video, and then decompressing it, you wind up with the exact same data as you put in. This is comparable to something like ZIP or RAR (In fact, one of the more common lossless codecs out there, Huffyuv, basically uses the same compression algorithm as ZIP on each frame of video to achieve its compression). Lossless has the advantage that no matter how many times you compress it, you still haven't lost any video data. The bad part is that most often you don't save nearly as much space as you would with other lossy compression algorithms. There are many different lossless codecs these days, some of which are described later on in this guide.

[Nya-chan Production]

So like.. you download an episode. - Lossless.

You edit and add effects - loss?

So then the render has loss?

Nope, you rip a DVD - lossless (with some loss from mastering, but you can't do anything about it)

You edit and add effects and render - lossless

You encode - lossy

[steelbaz]

I am assuming it's primarily for uploading on this particular site, as other sites don't have the same kind of stringet upload restrictions.

[Nya-chan Production]

I am assuming it's primarily for uploading on this particular site, as other sites don't have the same kind of stringet upload restrictions.

You mean encoding? No, that's just a polite thing to do so that people don't have to download 1GB of data when they can download 20MB.

[steelbaz]

I suppose, haven't ran into any 1 gig AMV's even if they weren't compressed, would be sweet though!!!