I am still working out was is the best options for recording good clean video with few/virtually no artifacts.

I have a high speced PC with a Decklink Quad card. Camera is a Canon XF205 with hD SDI output.

Here are some results from tests;

MPEG 4 - taxes out the CPU so not really an option.
MPEG 2 - recording at 1920x 1080i 32kbps gives a pretty good result, very stable recording but still not as clean as the raw video coming from the camera.
AVI - lots of options regarding the decklink encoders that produce very clean recording but some of these seem to up the bitrate. For instance using DVO setting creates a kbps reading 128,000! Its a shame the bitrate cant be tweaked here

I have not tested the WMV or WMV streaming options.

Ideally what I am after is a setting that records identical to my camera raw.

I film sport and on the camera record at 1440X1080 @ 25mbps and the footage is clean as a whistle in playing back through Vmix.


UPDATE: I recorded today MPEG2 1920X1080i @ 48kbps and the picture quality is nice and clean. 1 hour of recording = 20gig which I can live with.