Archiving a Project

Hi Mitchell,

That's a very good question. Capture and distribution codecs such as H.264 are highly compressed, which means that with every copy you make from them -even in the same format- you will lose information. You could compare this with JPEG and TIFF or PNG. When you see a photo with JPEG compression it will look pretty much as good as the same photo in uncompressed PNG format. But when you start making copies from the JPEG photo the picture quality will start deteriorating very fast while copies from the PNG photo will retain the original quality much longer.

When you export as ProRes422 you will of course not improve the native quality, but you will retain the same quality much longer if ever you need to use this master to make new copies of your program.

Best wishes,

Ronny

That's because the H.264 codec (same as AVCHD, MPEG and the likes) always dumps information whenever you recompress it, there is no way to make a 1:1 copy of a lossy codec. Just like there is no way you can make a copy of a JPEG photo and preserve every bit of information. It's the nature of these formats, it has nothing to do with the application you are using.

Actually there is no difference between Master File and Export File. They are just two names for the same process.

Best wishes,

Ronny