How to make video with no compression?

[aaroncohn]

Hi, I was just wondering if there's any way to make a finished video with no added compression in Pinnacle Studio 14. My source material was recorded in H.264 codec 720p. I run it through Pinnacle Studio, add some titles and transitions, and then hit the button to make the final video, but the only options available all involve re-compressing the video before packaging it out... and no matter what I do, it's always noticeable in the end result. Is there anything I can do to avoid the compression so my video quality doesn't suffer?

[Midnight Blue]

I haven't used Pinnacle for a while but don't think it's possible or nessasary to make a video without any compression. I don't know what options you have but when I used Pinnacle working in SD, I would choose DV .avi as my out put which always look fine to me, it was the least compressed of the formats I had available. If you are seeing issues in the video this could simply be a settings issue. For example if you are changing from HD to standard definition have you got the correct field order, you will always loose some image quality lowering the resolution.

If you are rendering in HD then what settings options do you have.

[aaroncohn]

Hi, thanks for your reply. The source video is 1280x720p @ 30fps, originally recorded in the H.264 codec. I set the project settings to match that, although it doesn't ask what codec was originally used. The background rendering option, which improves playback performance during editing and may reduce final rendering time, does not have the option for H.264, so it's actually being rendered in MPEG-2 while I'm editing it. When I want to produce the final video, I must click on "Make File," then I choose MPEG-4, because there is no H.264 option, and I used the HD 720p preset to encode the video. Fortunately, YouTube did recognize the video as HD and kept the resolution where it should be, but I did still notice some quality loss. I believe this is because the video has been compressed twice... first by me (which took forever), and then by YouTube. Ideally, I would like to edit the video in its original format, re-encode it in its original format (which should take very little time, because no conversion is necessary), and then upload to YouTube where it can be viewed with minimal loss of information. Anyone know how I can do this?