Does it change quality? Which format?

[ernest1a]

I am trying to making my video. Adobe After Affects has some features which Ulead MediaStudio doesn't have it, but it is much easier to use. Does it change any quality if I start to edit video with After Affect and than save it to .avi file and than again import to MediaStudio to continue with editing?

Which format is best to use to import to editing program, than again saving and again fromating and than puting it to youtube?

Tnx

[admin]

Unless you save as an uncompressed AVI file (huge file - 10 MB per second!), you will lose some quality. You can minimize the quality loss to practically nothing if you use compression (eg. DivX or XviD) but use a very high bit-rate/quality setting (use maximum bitrate allowable by either codec).

But if YouTube is your final output, then I don't think quality really matters that much because YouTube video quality sucks.

[admin]

Forgot to add that you can use what is called a lossless codec to save the AVI file (if Adobe After Effects and MediaStudio both support it). As the name suggests, these codecs do not suffer from quality loss when they are encoded, so while their file size is still far too huge for uploading onto YouTube, they are good as an intermediatary format for video editing. There are quite a few lossless video codecs around, here's one off the top of my head:

http://www.digital-digest.com/software/lagarith_lossless_video_codec.html

Once you have finished editing, you'll need to output the file using a proper compressor like DivX/XviD to keep the file size down, and then upload to YouTube.

[ernest1a]

Thanks for answer. So if I understand in right way I need to save as .avi format when I complete with editing with After Effect than I import that file to MediaStudio and again save again as .avi file when I finish. After that I open that file with proper compressor and output again that file to cut size down, right? Which output format is best to use?
Sorry but I have never done any video before

[admin]

I don't use Adobe After Effects or MediaStudio, so I don't know what kind of settings there are - there might be built in settings to allow the compression of DivX/XviD/Lossless AVI files, so you won't have to use another software to re-compress the AVI file after editing with MediaStudio.