My First Steps with iMac G5 & Director's Cut Take 2

[sparky13]

Hi all,

Last night I made a dry run of transferring footage from various sources through Director's Cut Take 2 via composite cables into iMovie HD then burned my first iDVD project. *Whoo!* My current setup is a 1.8GHz iMac G5 running Mac OS X version 10.3.9 (Panther) with 512 MB of RAM and currently 113GB of hard drive space.

Several newbie-level observations/questions follow... please be gentle!

Quality

I've heard great things about Miglia's Director's Cut Take 2, but was disappointed with the quality of its captured footage when I viewed it through iMovie. After playing the just-burned DVD on my television it looked much better (now I see the value of a preview monitor), but still wasn't up to par with what I was hoping for. What can I say... I'm a quality freak with the accompanying "not a lot of money to spend" restraint. <:P

(1) - I captured one piece of footage from a DVD of The Matrix. Even though it was through composite cables, should the quality of that footage on my subsequently burned DVD be noticably worse than that of a standard VHS recording from cable television? Would using an S-video cable have made an enormous difference in this case, are my expectations for video capture technology just too high, is the Macrovision copy protection adversely affecting the quality, does all captured footage need some finessing in a video editing program before it looks really good, or maybe something else entirely?

(2) - I also captured some predominately dark source footage in which you can faintly see walls, objects, and whatnot in the background. However, the Take 2 captured footage was a lot darker in both iMovie and the burned DVD, obscuring all that detail. Since there are no related controls on the Take 2 device, I must use software to correct it post-capture. There's a Brightness slider in the Effects section of iMovie, but it's far too sensitive to be relied on for delicate adjustments. What I was hoping to find was a system similar to Curves in Photoshop that I could tweak on a single frame of footage in real time then apply to the entire clip and optionally save the settings for reuse on other similar clips. Is something like this a standard feature in higher-end video editing programs?

NOTE - While skimming other threads the MPEG Streamclip program was mentioned. While it doesn't deliver Photoshop Curves-style functionality, it provides a far greater degree of control for making necessary brightness/contrast/saturation/etc. adjustments than iMovie. I've used it to substantially improve the dark-footage clip, but haven't tried improving the Matrix clip yet.

Memory

(3) - Might adding more memory than the 512 MB my iMac G5 currently has possibly increase the quality of the footage I'm capturing through Take 2 (which I didn't receive a manual with, in case my answer was there)? If so, how much extra memory would you recommend?

Other

(4) - I've turned off Airport along with all other non-finder applications before capturing with iMovie to prevent potential "hiccups" in the footage. Is this a good idea or completely unneccessary?

(5) - Roxio's Toast 8 Titanium seems like a staple program for DVD projects, but can it be used to import footage from Take 2 (instead of iMovie) and make brightness/contrast/saturation/etc. adjustments? Most of the Toast 8 reviews seem to focus on recent additions to the program and I don't seem to be able to download a demo of it... as is the case with several video editing programs.

(6) - If Toast 8 Titanium doesn't support importing and adjusting footage, what other capable (yet hopefully inexpensive) programs would you recommend as alternatives? In case it's not obvious, iMovie has failed to win me over... even if I didn't factor in the rather aggravating "Automatic DV Pillarboxing & Letterboxing enabled by default" introduction. <:/

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

[BJ_M]

Director's Cut Take 2 would be for capturing mostly VCR (unlike what their website says) ... DVD capture through composite (or s-video) will noticeably degrade the quality

[terryj]

Same as BJ_M...why if you had the DVD of the Matrix,
didn't you just Rip the DVD with MTR (free)
and then use MpegStreamclip (not free) to
take MTR's output, and make it a DV stream,
and bring that into iMovie HD?

less of a quality hit that way.....
and then you edit/crop/add transitions
and send it to iDVD or Toast and there you go.

[tomlee59]

The general principle of "garbage in, garbage out" applies to video as much as it does to (other forms of) computing. If you start with NTSC composite video (S-video being somewhat better, but still limited to NTSC resolution), then it hardly matters what happens next. You can't start with an NTSC stream and produce HD from it (for example). The best you can hope for is not to degrade what you have by too much.

If you have video in digital form already, then it's never smart to go back to analog (especially if the resolution is much lower), and then to digital yet again. Each conversion introduces degradation, so the general rule is to minimize the number of conversions. That goes for digital-to-digital, as well as for analog-to-digital and back. And keep in mind that the final output's quality will always be limited by the weakest link in the chain.


As to some of your other questions, more memory doesn't do anything for quality. At best, it can speeds things up (because semiconductor memory is much faster than HD memory).

And yes, deactivating anything that might contend with your capture app for computer resources is always a good idea. Airport and other networking should be shut off.

It is also wise to capture to a hard drive partition that has been wiped clean, or at least defragmented, to produce a large contiguous highway on which to lay down captured data.

[sparky13]

Thanks for all those that responded to my questions -- especially tomlee59 who answered the most!

Regarding (1), my goal was to see how good footage captured from various sources by the Director's Cut Take 2 (DCT2) unit itself was -- and, of course, that it actually did function at all. From various reviews I'd heard that the quality of DCT2-captured footage was excellent, and that it was unaffected by MacroVision protection so I figured capturing footage from a commercial DVD would produce the best quality the DCT2 was capable of delivering. I totally see the point you've all made about using a program like Mac The Ripper (which I didn't know about yet, thanks for mentioning it!) instead, but my aim was really to learn what the DCT2 was capable of... not duplicate footage using other (superior) methods. I did buy the DCT2 to transfer VCR footage to computer/DVD, but this is the first time I've actually burned anything (including a music CD) -- so I'm really starting from square one here! <:D

Can anyone help with questions (2), (5), and (6) now that the others have been addressed? Thanks!

[MacDSL]

Toast is not really for tweaking the videos other than maybe setting start/end points. If you can get it to do video color-correcting, it's going to be more of an asset-burning type application...

Remeber, what you basically want is the capability to tweak an image, and have that tweak move as the background moves. For that you usually need some kind of masking capability and that mask needs to be able to adjust itself at 30 frames-per-second. That capability tends to put you into the high-end Video Editing arena. There are color-corrention plug-ins for iMove and FCP, but I don't know of any for iMovie that give you Curves and Masking. If there is a third-part ap that works for iMovie, you most likely WILL be able to save "presets" that can be resued on other clips. FCP does offer the ability to save your color-corrections and apply them to other clips.

Not sure i've ever seen "win me over" and "inexpensive" in the real world. I usually see "win me over" associated with "needs optional hardware and is really dang expensive"...

But your mileage will vary.....