I've been messing with Serious Magic Ultra. The question I have is this...I transfer a dv tape using VV5...lossy compression #1, make a composited motion BG and encode to avi...compression #1. Now I import those clips to into Ultra and do my work there and compress again...compression #2. Import everything back to VV5. Finish the project and encode to mpg2 for dvd-lab...compression #3.

Is there a good codec (other than rendering uncompressed) that I won't see many artifacts? I suppose the loss would probably be minimal, but I want to reduce it as much as possible without rendering uncompressed.

TIA...