Have 3 technical questions with QuickTime formats. Can you help?

Question

Hi everyone,
I have 4 questions.
1)
If you were to rate the following file wrappers on a scale of 1 of 10 (10 offering the highest quality, 1 offering the lowest quality), what would you give the following file wrappers:
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
MP4
.AVI
.MOV
.FLV
2)
Also, can you give a brief one sentence overview of how efficient each of the above file wrappers are. I've tried Wikipedia, but they don't really put it in laymans' terms.
3)
Which of the following file wrappers are lossy, and which are uncompressed???
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
.AVI
.MOV
MP4
MPEG-4
.FLV
4)
Is there an uncompressed file wrapper you can upload your video to?
Thanks,
rc444
please email me [email protected] as I need this information urgently for my school assignment.

Answer 1

Wrong methodology for your questions.
It's what's inside the wrappers (codecs) that determine file size and quality.
All of those file extension use some level of compression and all are lossy.
The real answer is another question. "What is the format of your source video"? A DV digital camera would come into the computer at 13 GB's per hour and this .dv file can be edited using many different applications.
When you use these .dv files there is no loss in quality from your source. But at 13 GB's per hour the file size make an impractical delivery dilemma. You're forced, in most cases, to export to a delivery media (DVD, Web based files or CD's) and then you much choose other codecs and wrappers.
So now you must ask other questions. "How will my files be viewed"? "How small must the file size be based on the delivery media"? "How much compression and what codecs should I use"?
What do you have and where is it going to be viewed?