Capturing DV vs. MPEG

[natebetween]

Okay.....so I want to get the best possible capture card for the money I can spend (about $300) and I have been reading these forums and magazine articles SO MUCH that my head is about to EXPLODE!!

In reading about the different capture cards I've come up with a question that I haven't been able to find an answer to. In regards to a hardware based capture device:

What are the dis/advantages to capturing to DV over DVD quality MPEG???

The best that I can come up with is:

DV is easier to edit than MPEG? Am I correct? It's not like I need to add any effects. Any merging/cutting/de and remuxing of an mpeg that I do can easily be done in TMPGENC.

But DV is LARGER than MPEG typically, correct? (I only have two 40 gig drives) And on top of that, DV STILL has to be encoded to whatever format MPEG you want (VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc) which can take LOTS of time.

Am I looking at this correctly....or is there some advantage to capturing DV over DVD quality MPEG BESIDES the editiability?

[MOVIEGEEK]

Use DV if you will be doing alot of editing and if you want to make a video tape,that way you can save it on your digital camcorder(freeing up HDD space)and work with the video another day(DV is transfered as data and isn't as CPU intensive as MPEG).DV is approx. 13GB per hour.
Capturing in MPEG is best if you will have very few or no transitions or menus.Capturing to MPEG will result in faster authoring if you capture at 720x480(576 PAL)and what you want is a DVD(same with (S)VCD),DV will require rendering to MPEG to make a disk.MPEG-2 at 6000kbps is approx. 3 GB per hour.

[reubenray]

So is your end result being it is easier and faster to capture and transfer mpeg than DV to DVD? I am torn between a DV (device) and a mpeg capture card. I want the picture quality of a DV, but do not want the additional hassle of doing the transferrring part.

[mkelley]

First of all, it's *encoding* not transferring (very important to keep the terms straight). Secondly, if you don't want the hassle of encoding, then you've pretty well defined your choice -- you need to capture MPEG.

As a *very* general rule you won't be able to get as good a quality capturing MPEG with all but the very highest MPEG real-time encoding/capturing devices, but the quality may be overkill depending upon your capture source. Certain if you are shooting DV video you do not want to capture MPEG, but in that case you almost surely will be doing editing that will require a good editing program that will edit DV-AVI.

One last thing -- the original poster talked about hard drive limitations and I would only say this: that is the one thing you should *not* worry about. With 120 meg high speed IDE drives going for $100 or so, there's no excuse not to have enough hard drive space. Indeed, whether you capture MPEG or not, I'd recommend anyone with only two 40 meg drives who's going to be working in video to upgrade at least one of those drives post haste. Trust me -- you'll run out of space even with MPEG captures and work unless you do this.

[MOVIEGEEK]

If the end result will be VHS then go DV.
If the end result is disk then capture MPEG,unless you have a slow CPU(<1.4 Ghz PIII or Duron) then I would use DV.
BTW...DV is NOT encoded it is simply data until rendered to MPEG.

[reubenray]

I will be using the capture card for two reasons. To capture from my satellite receiver to the hard drive (similiar to a VCR) and sometimes to encode this to DVD.

The second reason is to transfer my old VHS tapes to DVD. I would like to have the best PQ possible and this is why I have been looking at the DV style "devices".

When you do the encoding is this something that can be set up and just let it run? If so doing DV will not be a problem. I could just start it up and then watch TV and check back and forth with it.

My HTPC consists of a Athlon XP2000 (1.7ghz), Asus A7N8X Deluxe MB, 120 GB Hard Drive and Radeon 9500 Pro. I do not have a DVD Writer yet, due to the fact I want to get the capturing down first.

[mkelley]

Encoding is often done unattended -- indeed, a lot of us do batch encoding (assuming you have enough disk space :>) setting up all the encoding jobs we need and let it run at night or while we're at work (those of us who work :>)