Damaged DV footage

[sadrabbit]

I have a project where miniDV footage was shot on some bad tapes. Editing has been done, cutting around the obvious bits of digital noise, and it looks pretty good in Final Cut. But now, burning onto dvd, the re-compression to mpeg2 appears to bring out distortion that wasn't apparent before in the worse-off sections of tape.

Any suggestions? What if we look at putting the project on tape, in some format that wouldn't add additional compression of the source? If we put it on MiniDV, might we benefit from having it be the same kind of compression it had in the first place?

Thanks much!

[edDV]

DV is digital data. It is moved from tape to the hard disk over IEEE-1394 (Firewire) as a data stream. Once on hard disk there is nothing further to change.

If you think the data on the tape wasn't extracted correctly, you need to retransfer the data. You might want to try a different camcorder and see if that makes a difference.

[InXess]

Dirty video head, tape transport affect extraction. Try cleaning. Camcorders (miniDV) don't like switching tapes around so try to use the original cam or as edDV suggests try to find a better match (you may get excellent results unless the tape is worn). Keeping in the same format will give you less artifacts. Try a different MPEG encoder. ConvertxtoDVD produces good output from so so sources... worth a try as well as other encoders (depending what you have used). Generally you shouldn't have that much deterioration so I suspect that you could find a better match here as well.