Storing DV files to DVD for futur editing.

[dominicke]

DV Camera with high quality 1 hour tape

I want to extract the content of the tape and burn the file to a DVD for futur editing with Adobe premier (Not a DVD usable in a DVD player). How is it possible to compress without loosing quality and be usable by Premier Pro. How many minutes can be stored on a DVD without loosing quality and which compression use?

Thank you

[FOO]

You get about 20 minutes without compression.
DV is 13 Gb/hour
If I had to do that . I'd encode to MPEG2. There are ways to get it back into Premiere

[yoda313]

Hello,
I'm not an expert on dv cameras but here goes. When you transfer you get an avi file. So if the avi file is less than 4.7gb just burn that as a data file in any burner. If its larger use an avi cutter to split it to fit the disc.
Kevin
P.S. You could transfer at the top rate and then cut that file. You may have synch issues later though. There are tons of forum postings on sync problems you can check.

[andkiich]

Another option might be to buy an external hard drive(firewire or USB 2.0).

I have a 120 GB drive that I dump things. You could leave a lot uncompressed and it would take a few minutes to transfer from the mai nsystem drives to the external and you are not "wasting" DVDR discs, no splitting, no sync issues(as long as you didn't have any to begin with )

You can get drives larger than 120GB as well.

Just something else to consider.

[PIntag]

DV Camera with high quality 1 hour tape

I want to extract the content of the tape and burn the file to a DVD for futur editing with Adobe premier (Not a DVD usable in a DVD player). How is it possible to compress without loosing quality and be usable by Premier Pro. How many minutes can be stored on a DVD without loosing quality and which compression use?

Thank you

Look, here's the thing. DV is already a compressed format (about 5:1 compression ratio). It is about 13.5GB per hour of video and won't compress any further with lossless encoding. Any further compression that you do to it will be lossy and you will sacrifice quality.

This is the whole problem with digital video in general. Uncompressed video can be over 80GB per hour of video. Lossless compression methods net only compression ratios of 2:1 or 3:1 at best. Every other video format is an attempt to compress it with lossy methods while maintaining as high quality as possible. Everybody who works with digital video in any way, shape, or form needs to understand this concept.

[dominicke]

If I understand well, even if I do the best I can to keep the best quality, this best quality will be lost when I will burn a DVD to show what I did because DVD add a level of compression.

[PIntag]

If I understand well, even if I do the best I can to keep the best quality, this best quality will be lost when I will burn a DVD to show what I did because DVD add a level of compression.

Yes, there is some quality loss in going from DV format to MPEG2 format, but if done well, will not be very noticable. However, MPEG2 is not very suitable for video editing because it contains some "data frames" which contain only information, not the actual image data. These data frames describe changes to the images from frame to frame and are much smaller in size than image frames. This is how MPEG2 achieves its relatively high compression rates. All high-compression video file formats (that I am aware of) operate on this principle.

In contrast, each frame in a DV file contains image data. The image within each frame is compressed (like JPEG images) using a lossy compression algorithm. This makes it much more suitable for editing and is probably the format you want to keep it in. The entire video editing community is waiting in anticipation for a new optical storage format in the 20+GB range to become mainstream and affordable. Can anyone say "Blue ray"?

[Thorn]

If you have a lot of tapes that are fairly full, keep the tapes and buy more in bulk. Costco has them for a few dollars, as do several online retailers.

I wouldn't want to spend the time to split a large file into 4.3GB chunks, archive it, then bring it back from the archive just to save $2.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of short clips, say under ~20 minutes, you can fit 4.3GB on a DVD so keep it in DV format and burn. If you wanted to go double layer you could fit 8.5GB but the discs are probably more expensive than DV tapes.

Do NOT convert to mpeg unless you're experienced enough to know that you won't want to re-encode later. In my early video days I converted a few clips to mpeg1 and destroyed the original copies. A few years later I found that the quality was somewhat lacking when I converted for DVD.

[PIntag]

Yeah, Thorn is right. The best way to archive your DV footage, right now and for the near future, is DV tape. Sure, it's slower and less convenient than optical storage, but the tapes are pretty cheap and should have a long enough shelf life to last until there is a better option.