While I'm waiting for some sample clips, I did a quick comparison on converting a 20 minute HD 60p MTS clip into both HuffYUV (v2.1.1 from 2003) and MagicYUV (v2.0.0 from 2018) using VDub2.
Obviously this test resulted in much bigger files (and longer conversion times) than you're likely to ever get with an analog tape source, but the differences are very stark and I'm wondering if there's a reason you've chosen HuffYUV over Magic (and/or any other lossless codecs).
To start, the MYUV conversion whipped along at over 200fps and created an 85.9GB AVI file in under 6 minutes. (The source file is 3.9GB in size and was located on an internal HDD. The target disk in both tests was an internal SSD):
The HuffYUV conversion was
much slower, taking well over an hour to produce a 206GB(!) AVI file
Maybe I don't have something optimized for HuffYUV, but the conversion performance alone is poor enough that I wouldn't really consider using it.
Especially with HD or above clips.
When I brought both clips into the full 64-bit PD17 editor, I ran into a serious preview performance issue with the HuffYUV clip, but not anything you'd likely run into with lower resolution clips. As you can see from the MediaInfo tabs, the only real difference between the two converted clips is the overall bit rate:
Since HuffYUV's overall bitrate is more than double MYUV's, the file size also has to be more than double, but I think it's the bitrate itself that leads to the performance issue in PD17. Actually I think it's a system issue, because even my Samsung 860 EVO SSD can't keep up with an almost 1.5Gbps bitstream. Lowering the preview resolution had no effect at all, which is why I think the bottleneck is in trying to get all that data off the SSD every second.
Again, that's not going to impact any lower res clips, but it's the end of my
HD HuffYUV testing. The MagicYUV clip, as you might expect, ran smoothly even in Full HD Preview Resolution and with a second full screen monitor. The source MTS clip was mostly useable in the same configuration, but it skipped 1 or 2 frames every second.
Once I get some sample clips, I can look at the editor performance with a more realistic setup, and see what I can find about improving the burned disc video quality. One step at a time, though!
YouTube/optodata
DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors
Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°