Rendering DV

[Death-Toaster]

Just was wondering if rendering DV multiple times would degrade it like MPEG.

Would i suffer much quality loss if i did something like, capture DV video from a video camera, edit it, encode to DV, then encode to mpeg.

[pijetro]

capture DV video from a video camera, edit it, encode to DV

So long as you're cutting, or joining footage, the guts haven't changed. There's no need for rerendering at this point..
The only rendering that should happen is at fades, or video effects..

That's the good thing about DV. In theory, you can transfer to your H.D.D., edit, and send back to tape, without degredation...You shouldn't have to render footage, unless the guts change, like i mentioned earlier...

Good luck!!!

[guns1inger]

Depending on the codec, you may be able to render up to 4 generations before noticable degradation. As you don't count the initial transfer from tape to disk as a generation, you should have plenty to play with. If you plan you edits carefully, then you should ever have to render once for the final edit with fades/titles etc. If you need to do a lot of comping in after effects or similar, you might find those sections going through twice.

[Death-Toaster]

Thanks guys!

The plan is to download the video from miniDV tape with Adobe Premier, edit it into a movie with titles, fades, effects and whatnot. Then render that all into one DV file, encode to mpg, and author a dvd.

[Mikhail]

In order to pass your footage from Premier after applying all effects to any MPEG-2 coding program it makes sense to use a frame server which transmits the frames directly to the coding software without writing them to avi file. In that case it's not necessary to convert your movie to DV once again (I guess that consumes some time and takes a lot of space on your HDD).
It's quite another matter, if you are going to create a backup copy of the edited movie in DV format and write it back to the camcorder.

[pijetro]

Actually, take another step, and encode to Mpeg2 straight off the timeline..Premiere has the built in Mainconcept encoder...

Great space saver...

Good luck!!!

[sitlet]

Actually, take another step, and encode to Mpeg2 straight off the timeline..Premiere has the built in Mainconcept encoder...

yes, if your final output is to be mpg, just hit file-export timeline, and export it directly to mpg. unless you want to use another program to convert to mpg, but premiere works just fine.

[Beavis]

Also remember that when you render a DV project with any decent editor, the only part which actually get re-encoded is the parts where you've applied edits, effects, etc.. Everything else should just be copied directly without a re-encode. IE, the smart-render.