Compression on Clips

[design]

Collecting clips in uncompressed format takes up a lot of space as we all know. But after you've got a bunch of clips, and you need to compress them to save room and to work on and edit them with effects, what secondary codec do you guys use? For my past two movies I've used Cinepak by Radius, but it takes forever to compress and loses some color quality, even with max settings. I've tried using divx, and it responds very slowly to preview, and xvid doesn't seem to want to even show up in a preview mode in Premiere. Although I'm content with Cinepak for the most part, I'm looking for something that can give good file size drop and still maintain quality. Any suggestions on this matter?

[fong]

i leave them uncompressed, on my external HD soooo it has alot of space. then when finished xvid compressionnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

[tice]

Huffyuv is a lossless codec that is basically the same as uncompressed but smaller file size.

[sani]

Huffyuv is the equivalent of flac/wavpack/shorten/ape for your music files, akin to zipping in a way.
http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html

edit: i made a post in the past (can't find it) that you have to set the xvid 4cc to Divx and premiere/vegas should be able to accept xvid clips.