Pioneer DVR-531H-S Frame Loss Question

[Dragorn]

Basically, here’s the situation: I have an approx. 2.5-hour recording on my unit’s hard drive, in XP quality. I want to burn this recording off the hard drive; however, I also don’t want to downgrade from XP quality. So, I plan to divide the recording into 3 smaller, sub-1-hour segments, and then burn each of those to a DVD. But… it’s very important that no frames of the original recording be lost in this process. Is using frame-accurate editing to make the two divisions sufficient to ensure zero frame loss?

If that wouldn’t work (and this may be addressed in the manual, but I couldn’t find anything on it), could the desired effect be achieved simply by burning the recording without dividing it first? I haven’t tried burning a recording that exceeded the capacity of a DVD to see how it would react. Would the unit simply burn as much of the recording as it could to the disc, and then stop? Or would it then allow me to insert another DVD and then continue burning the recording onto there until it was finished?

[trhouse]

There are several ways to edit on the 531H. Frame accurate editing will not retain frame accuracy if you burn to a dvd-video mode disk. It retains the accuracy with a dvd-r(VR) mode burn.

There are two ways to divide. In one, the divide function permanently divides the original capture and it cannot be combined again. There is a second way called chapter edit. With chapter edit, the original 2.5 hour capture is not altered.

I just use video mode edit which is not frame accurate. Then divide in the chapter edit function which will skip forward or back to the nearest GOP. When the next recording is made, I just make sure that the beginning overlaps the previous divide point a little. This is easy to do since you can combine the previously divided chapters and move the divide point slightly back of were the previous divide was.

[mattso]

I've never had a problem retaining frame accuracy when burning to DVD Video Mode?

[trhouse]

Oops, I should have said if you use the high speed copy function to make a video mode dvd. It is on page 77 of the manual. If you use realtime copy, the video is re-encoded but it preserves the accuracy. I have never done that.