best program for ....

[dvnoob]

capturing DV to your HD, and converting to mpeg on the fly.

THANKS !

[guns1inger]

I assume this is a question ?

Mainconcept

Or, buy a DVD Recorder with DV in.

Either of these will do for 60 minutes or less, if your PC can sustain 9000 kbps.

If you have longer captures you are better of transfering as DV, then doing 2-pass VBR encoding.

[dvnoob]

lol, yes that was/is a question. A dvd recorder with dv in huh, didn't know about that. I have a bunch of 60/90 min dv tapes, all recorded at 60 min hi quality speed so they are all 1 hour.

Am I right in assuming that the results will be the same if i use mainconcept to go from dv to mpeg directly as opposed to capturing dv as avi, then converting to mpeg?

reason is, I am considering saving all my tapes as avi files on the hd so if the tape should take a dump 1 day i will still have a perfect copy.

thanks again!

[guns1inger]

DV tapes -> HDD @ 13 GB/hour of footage = lots of space.

If you use CBR encoding, then encoding directly should be the same quality, assuming your PC can keep up the data rate.

If you want to do longer encodes, or lower bitrates so you can put two tapes to a disc, then 2-pass (or multi-pass in the case of CCE) VBR encoding is the better option, however this cannot be done in real-time.

[redwudz]

If you want the best quality for archiving, save the DV on your hard drive. Or preserve the original DV tapes.

If you want a 1:1 transfer to your hard drive of your DV, WinDV works well. About 13GB per hour of DV.

If you want to convert them on the fly with MainConcept to MPEG-2 , obviously the quality will be lower. You would get better quality by saving the DV to the hard drive, then converting to MPEG-2 with a standalone encoder. This will take longer, but with better quality. I use TMPGEnc encoder for the DV to MPEG-2 conversion, but there are many more in 'Tools' to the left. <<<<<<

Quick and easy, a DVD recorder with DV (1394) input will work well enough.

[dvnoob]

yes 13 gig per tape, its alot but that fine.

"You would get better quality by saving the DV to the hard drive, then converting to MPEG-2 with a standalone encoder"

seems odd, why is that?

I like tmpgenc too, i just dont know if i am using the right settings for best quality.

what do you think of dvapp as a capture?

thanks.

[redwudz]

The main reason a standalone encoder program will do better is that it can take more time. It can do two pass encoding, for example. Or filtering. This all takes time. Real time or 'on the fly' encoding just uses the quickest methods, not usually the best.

I've used MainConcept encoder for 'on the fly' DV encoding to MPEG-2. Without the buffer activated, my computer couldn't keep up. I was using a 2500+ Athlon, OCed to 2.0Ghz. With the buffer, the encode would finish up a few minutes after the transfer completed. I have a much faster computer now, but I haven't tried it again.

If I encoded the DV from the HD, I could use any setting I wanted and have the best quality. I also could edit the DV on the HD before encoding to MPEG-2 with VirtualDub Mod, then frameserve that to TMPGEnc. This avoided sync problems and the more difficult MPEG editing. But this all does take more time.

It makes no difference at all what application you use to transfer the DV file to the computer with. It is a file transfer, nothing more. No capturing involved. The only settings you really have are the choice of Type 1 or Type 2 DV. TMPGEnc needs Type 2.