Digicam Movie Conversion and Archiving

[boblin2]

I have many video clips from a Canon PowerShot S3 IS digital camera, and I want to combine them into a complete movie, archive the movie with minimum compression for future editing, transfer the movie to DVD, and have a copy of the movie on my network drive for streaming to my PC or (in the future) a TV with networking capabilities.

I live in Canada, so my TV standard is NTSC (29.97fps), and I have analogue and digital TV's, plus a computer with an LCD screen.

The video clips from the digicam are 640x480 30fps (non-interlaced) with stereo sound. The files are MJPEG in an AVI wrapper.

I will be archiving all the video clips that come direct from the camera, as this will be my true source, and if necessary I will always have it to go back to.

For editing and cleanup of the video clips I use VirtualDub to convert them to Huffyuv AVI 720x480 30fps (I assume it's progressive). The files are large, but I can play around with them without worrying about reducing the quality. I then convert the clips to DV 720x480 at 30fps and create my movie from these clips.

Having completed the movie, I want to do four things:
1. Archive the DV video clips on DVD along with the editing software's project file, and discard the very large Huffyuv files.
2. Archive the DV movie file on DVD for the creation of future file formats/delivery systems.
3. Convert the movie to MPEG-2 for authoring of a DVD.
4. Convert the movie to DivX for viewing on my PC; streamed from my network drive.

Here's my questions:
1. When I convert from Huffyuv AVI at 30fps to DV (the CODEC) at 30fps, the result is always interlaced! I am using the MainConcept DV codec. What, if anything, am I losing when it goes from Progressive 30fps to Interlaced?

2. At what point should I convert from 30fps to 29.97fps?

3. Is there a better way?

Any advice is appreciated.

[redwudz]

DV is interlaced. I am confused why you are converting from Huffy to DV? If DV is what you want, why not go to it directly? Or if you don't want it interlaced, skip the DV entirely.

The rest of it, I don't know, but some of our members should be able to give better information.

And welcome to our forums.

[boblin2]

redwudz: As I understand it, Huffyuv is lossless, whereas DV does lose some of the quality. However, if I can do everything I want with a video clip in one pass, and output directly to DV, I can see that this would be the way to go.

Capturing from my VHS tapes is more problematic because I cannot do all the desired processing/filtering at the same time I am doing the capture. That is how and why I ended up using Huffyuv. For the digicam video clips, I like your suggestion. Thanks.

Regarding skipping the DV format, I really don't want to lose picture quality, and I have not heard of a codec that is a good as DV in image quality, size, commonly available, and all I frames. If I can save my progressive video clips in DV format, (without further quality loss or affecting my future options), I am hoping that I can archive to Dv tapes as well as DVD.