DVD Camcorders... Quality of video?

[dvd-dude]

Does anyone know how the DVD camcorders perform? I wonder if the results are better than usual because the source is fed directly to the DVD before going to any tape format. However, I can't imagine the quality is good enough for editing with afterwards (since it is already compressed with MPEG2). It's funny, because I could edit with footage from an official commercial DVD release (if it wasn't copy protected let's say) and it would look great (i.e. the new Lord of the Rings DVDs are sharp, clear, awesome). However, if I convert something from a VHS to a DVD you can start to see artifacts and what not - nothing you'd want to try to edit and reencode later on. I wonder if these new DVD camcorders are closer to the VHS conversion quality or the commercial DVD quality.

Sony DCR-DVD201
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home;jsessionid=BKY7RAPwUp!-1953369977?O=Hotpicks&A=getItemDetail&Q=&sku=32053 6&is=REG

-DVD-Dude

[Richard_G]

The quality from them is pretty poor. They use 8cm disks that hold just under 2Gb so the compression is set fairly high to give a decent amount of recording time per disk. They are intended for the average Joe that wants to be able to take the disk out of his camcorder and play it back on his TV without having to mess around with cables. For anyone that is into video editing, stick with MiniDV and Firewire transfers.

With a commercial DVD you are starting off with very high quality video footage in the first place that has been encoded to give the best quality while keeping the size down to what will fit on a DVD9 disk. A conversion from VHS doesn't have anything like the quality there in the first place and is downgraded when you do the capture/encode/author process.