Will a camcorder with higher a/d converter......

bustardvan · Member Joined: 27 Apr 2007 Location: United States

Hi everyone, first post here. Glad I found this forum because I'm getting ready to transfer a big box of vhs's. Like just about everyone else, I want the best quality for transferring my old home videos from the early 90s to dvd. I will be playing my cassettes on my jvc s-vhs vcr and will pass the video out through the s-video and into my sony dcr-p110 camcorder. My camcorder can pass the video in real time; and from the camcorder out through firewire I will be capturing the stream with Final Cut Pro.

Now my question is, will a camcorder with a higher a/d converter chip produce better quality when transferring vhs to dv? I believe my camcorder has a 10 or 12-bit a/d converter chip and the newer sony camcorders have a 14-bit a/d chip. Will the differences in the bits make a noticable difference? Or since has vhs has such a low bitrate/pixels that the difference in bits will not make any difference?

Thanks a lot! I appreciate everyone's input.

Edit: By the way I just realized this would probably be more appropiate in the "capturing" forum. So if a Mod can move it please. Thanks

redwudz · Mod Neophyte Joined: 07 Sep 2002 Location: AZ, USA

Actually DV to computer is just transferring, not capturing. So better in our DV forum. Moving you.

I doubt the a/d converter type would make much difference with VHS conversions, but others with more DV experience might be able to give better advice.

And welcome to our forums.

Cornucopia · Posted: Apr 27, 2007 22:20

Since the chain of conversion goes like this (in your case):

VHStape -> SVHSvcr -> Svideo cable -> DVCam's A-to-D -> DVCam's DVcompression -> Firewire cable -> DVfile AVI save

You'll notice that there's that DV compression stage.
As DV compression is 8bit 4:1:1, no matter what comes earlier, it'll get whittled down to that level. However, better A-to-D conversion can help with the DV compressor's estimation of color level. But it's not just a matter of color bit depth in the A-to-D and DV compression, there's also:

Dithering and/or Rounding first vs. just Truncating
Oversampling w/ downconversion vs. Equalsampling
Purity of sampling clock to reduce jitter color/luminance estimation errors
...and others

There are differences, but it is kind of a logarithmic scale, where each improvement makes incrementally less difference.
In terms of consumer vs. semipro vs. pro, the main difference in cams is in the features, the optics and the chip(s)--sizes, #, etc. This is all bypassed when doing analog passthrough.

Scott
_________________
"You don't know what you got, until you lose it".--John Lennon