No Quality loss>Hi8>DVD?

[qa767]

I am just starting to learn how to capture Hi8 video footage using a ATI AIW card in AVI format and editing in Adobe Premiere, then finally authoring in Adobe Encore.

What steps I take are as follows. I capture in 640x480 Avi format using the Huffyuv codec. I then break the 2 hours of capture into clips that will eventually be chapters in a DVD with a total length of approx 1.75 to almost 2 hours on a disk. When I "export movie" from Premiere, my settings are AVI file type, Huffyuv for compression with the "recompress" box checked and a setting of "maintain data rate". I then author the clips in Encore and build an image file, which I use to burn to a disk later.

My question is. I don't want to lose quality from the original Hi8 footage when converting to DVD format. Do I need to recompress out of Premiere and dose that degrade the video. Am I doing or not doing somthing in the steps laid out in the way I change from tape to DVD disk?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[guns1inger]

Chapters are not seperate clips. If you break it down you get seperate titles instead, and navigation is not as smooth. Chapters are simply marker points in a single title. If you have one video, with 20 chapters, you output one video from premiere.

I don't use encore, but I thought you could import premiere projects into the timeline, and have Encore encode from there. That would save you an intermediate encoding. Otherwise, encode to mepg2 from the premiere timeline, and load the encode material into Encore. One way or the other, you will have to encode to mpeg2 for DVD anyway, and if you don't use a half-d1 resolution, expect some quality drop for anything longer than around 70 - 75 minutes.

[redwudz]

qa767, please use a more descriptive title in your posts. 'Am I doing this right' is not descriptive of the subject and makes future searching for your subject impossible. I will change it for you this time.

Moderator redwudz

[thefiddler]

Because you've stuck with Huffyuv, you're not compressing anything (at least not where you're loosing anything). So you're on the right track there. As guns1inger says though, you need to convert to MPEG2 at some point, so you might as well do that from premier, then encore won't have to re-render/compress it for DVD. I'm a Vegas+DVD user, but I'm sure there's some details on how best to do this in the Premiere help file. It probably also has some presets on its MPEG2 codec that are specifically for sending to Encore DVD.

One thing you might look into though (considering you want to maintain the highest quality possible), is look at the possibility of capturing your video at 720x480 with a .9 aspect ratio. When you output to DVD, its taking your 640x480 video and stretching it out to 720x480 (so it's only stretching the horizontal). But then the DVD is played back in 4:3 (normal squarish TV aspect, not widescreen), it's played back so that each pixel is approximately 9/10ths as wide as it is tall. So in other words, the DVD's 720x480 is squoze slightly so that your video that was originally 640x480 still looks like it is 640x480 even though it was stretched to 720x480 to be put on DVD. So if you can capture to 720x480 with a .9 pixel aspect ratio, you might get slightly better results since your video won't have to be stretched, it will have been captured that way in the first place.

But other than that, you're doing it right. You just might encode to MPEG2 from Premiere to save time, shouldn't make any real difference in the outcome.

[edDV]

...

My question is. I don't want to lose quality from the original Hi8 footage when converting to DVD format. Do I need to recompress out of Premiere and dose that degrade the video. Am I doing or not doing somthing in the steps laid out in the way I change from tape to DVD disk?

There are losses in every step. Don't kid yourself.

1. Capture to 640x480 Huffyuv.

Make sure you use S-video cables to avoid Y/C separation losses. Remaining losses depend on the quality of the NTSC decoding and the A/D conversion in your capture card. 640x480 must be rescaled to either 704/720x480 or 352x480 for DVD. Consider capture to 704x480.

https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

2. "Lossless" copy.

You won't get lossless to DVD format. It must compress to MPeg2. Consider saving the edit master back to Huffyuv (or DV format) compression as an archive file. Do not deinterlace. Then encode the timeline to MPeg2 for DVD. Use the internal Mainconcept MPeg2 encoder ("export timeline Adobe MPeg encoder") or some other encoder from your archive file. For best results, minimize MPeg2 compression (e.g. 8200-9500 Kbps, CBR video with either PCM or compressed audio).

Use the MPeg calculator.
https://www.videohelp.com/calc

[qa767]

Thanks for the tips, but I had to switch hardware from an ATI All in Wonder product to a Canopus ADVC-110. I could not get the ATI card to work for me and with taking two or so weeks to get it to work, I gave up. I tried everything to get it to work such as updating all drivers,bios and video drivers for my PC. A few clean installations of my operating system and programs. But I still had problems with capturing with the ATI card.The ADVC-110 works just like I hoped it would straight out of the box.

[dvd3500]

I was going to suggest the ADVC 110 or even the ADVC 300.