Is there a better way to get optimal quality converting from .flv to DV?

[brassplyer]

Got a 1080p vid off Youtube. Is anything going to allow me to retain more of the original quality with the goal of going to Mainconcept DV than first converting the .flv to uncompressed video and then to DV? I tried converting to mpeg-ll first with the hightest bitrate Super will put out but still find the image loses a lot in the process even just at the mpeg-ll stage.

So far the intermediate step of converting to uncompressed with Super seems to retain the most image quality.

Thanks for all input.

[guns1inger]

You are always going to loose a lot of quality, simply because you are reducing the resolution to 1 6th of the original. That is going to have an impact.

Every re-encoding will also have an impact, and if you use a lossy codec such as mpeg-2 or Divx etc then you are not only reducing the quality, but throwing away data that you won't get back when you then encode yet again to DV.

Personally, I am not much of a fan of SUPER, and think that there are better quality options around, however regardless of which encoder you use, you can't put 1080 HD into a DV container and not loose some of the quality.

[brassplyer]

regardless of which encoder you use, you can't put 1080 HD into a DV container and not loose some of the quality.

Understood. Do you think there's a better way to retain as much quality as possible than by first going to uncompressed?

[guns1inger]

You gain nothing at all going to an intermediate format. Even if you were going to do some filtering in avisynth first, you are still better off going directly from your 1080 flv source to DV. Encoding to another format in between cannot improve the quality, and only wastes time and risks reducing the quality further.

Why do you think going to an intermediate format (such as uncompressed) would help maintain quality ?

[brassplyer]

You gain nothing at all going to an intermediate format. Even if you were going to do some filtering in avisynth first, you are still better off going directly from your 1080 flv source to DV.

What will convert directly to DV from .flv? I don't find that Super will do it.

Why do you think going to an intermediate format (such as uncompressed) would help maintain quality ?

1. Lack of anything currently in my toolbox that I've found is able to go directly from .flv to DV - the "DV" selection within Super apparently is something else.
2. So far experimentation has yielded the best results doing it that way.

[guns1inger]

Where possible, grab the MP4 version instead of the flv version, as more converters are likely to work with it. That said, I have just downloaded a 1080 youtube clip as flv (using firefox and videodownloadhelper), then converted it to PAL DV with XmediaRecode without any problems. The only (small) issue is that the output is 16:9, but the DV file is not flagged as such, so playback is stretched. This can be fixed in your editor or player though.

[brassplyer]

Where possible, grab the MP4 version instead of the flv version, as more converters are likely to work with it. That said, I have just downloaded a 1080 youtube clip as flv (using firefox and videodownloadhelper), then converted it to PAL DV with XmediaRecode without any problems. The only (small) issue is that the output is 16:9, but the DV file is not flagged as such, so playback is stretched. This can be fixed in your editor or player though.

Is there any option besides .flv on YouTube?

[guns1inger]

It depends on the video. The video I sampled had flv at all resolutions, as well as MP4 at 1080 and 640. Most newer clips have an MP4 version. It probably also depends on what your downloader can see and makes available to you. Like I said above, I use Firefox and the VideoDownload Helper plugin, which seems to find all the versions of the clip.