What is better Firewire or S-Video for camcorde cature?

[Struppi]

Hi,
what is the best way to capture camcorder material on your PC in order to put it on a DVD? Is it Firewire or S-Video?

[OmegaSupreme]

If you have a digital camcorder, firewire will give you the best picture quality. Firewire is a digital transfer, S-Video is analog.

[ZippyP.]

I agree. Firewire is a straight bit-for-bit transfer of digital information, S-video involves some sort of analog to digital conversion. Anytime that video is converted there is always quality loss.

Once transferred, your DV footage will still need to be converted to mpeg (using an encoder) for placing on a DVD. With S-video you can capture to mpeg "on the fly" but it will not give as good a quality.

[redwudz]

Firewire. Check the DV forum for more info: https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=40

[Struppi]

Thanks guys. I went to CC and bought myself a nice card including cable and ULead VideoStudio 6 (full) for 19.99 (they made a mistake on their price tag). It works great. The quality of the DVD material is great. I didn't expect it to be that good. And it was so easy in addition to that. Now I'm just talking about getting the material from the camera on the PC. Editing will be the next step.

Thanks again.

Regards