All I Want is Decent DV

[Confederate]

I recently bought a DV camcorder that renders wonderful recordings. When I hook it up to a TV, the images look great. When I use my firewire connection, I can easily record it to my hard drive as an .avi file and it, too, looks crisp.

Now here's the rub. I want to put the finished product on a DVD, but encoding .avi to DVD takes forever and, the worst part, I lose considerable image quality and contrast.

I have Adobe Premiere 6.02 and don't know if upgrading to 6.5 (or 7.0) is worth the money. I've also used Ulead's Movie Factory.

As I understand it, .avi files take up a lot of space -- like 20 minutes to a DVD. QUESTION: Since I'm new to this, is there a better way? Also, how much better is DV quality than Hi-8?

Thanks!

Confederate

[vsenapati]

Try using tmpgenc 2.55 for encoding DV to DVD and you will find there will be no loss in quality. I have been capturing analog video using Canopus ADVC 50 and saving in DV, then encoding it to VCDs which I find is quite good in quality.

[racer-x]

Yes the upgrade to Premiere 6.5 is worth it. It comes with Main Concept encoder, wich is excellent ( make sure to update to v1.3, it's 30% faster). I don't know what you used for encoding, but either you used wrong settings or the encoder is garbage. I use CBR @ 8000 kbps and it looks as good as source DV.

From what i've read, Mini DV has over 500 lines of horizontal resolution. High 8 has 400 lines only if viewed using S-Video.