DV or DVD mpeg from Capture?

[shagaluf]

Question:

When i want to capture my movies from my digital CAM
I get the question if i want to capture it to "DV or DVD mpeg".


When i choose DV the file gets very big but and the quality is great.
But still ,before i can burn
a DVD disc, i must convert it to mpeg...

So is there any benifits to choose DV or should i always use mpeg during
capturing?

Any tips on how the get the best quality from capturing from Digital CAM?

[daamon]

Hi shagaluf,

So is there any benifits to choose DV or should i always use mpeg during capturing?

Benefits of capturing to DV:
1. You're actually just transferring data from your cam to PC, so there should be no quality loss.
2. It's easier to edit AVI without the danger of introducing problems - A common one being audio synch issues if editing MPEG.
3. When using a dedicated encoder to do AVI -> MPEG, it can do it in it's own time and so give you a better quality MPEG as a result. Encoding on the fly (capturing direct to MPEG) can mean that the encoder doesn't have time to do the best job possible, and so not such a good MPEG as a result.

Negatives of capturing to DV:
1. At around 13Gb per hour, it can eat up your disk space quickly / need a large hard drive.
2. Encoding to MPEG (especially DVD compliant MPEG2) can take a long time even for shorter clips (say 30 mins) - The influencing factors are: how long the clip is, your CPU speed (min 1.4Ghz - depends on your patience threshold), memory (512DDR is good), the settings in the encoder (e.g. Motion Search in TMPGEnc - the better the search, the slower), any filters used etc.

Mind you - I leave mine to encode overnight... No worries as long as it doesn't crash (never has).

My personal preference is DV over MPEG any day. But that's for you to decide.

Any tips on how the get the best quality from capturing from Digital CAM?

Check out this link:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=809541#809541

And the one in the subsequent post (in the link above).

Hope that helps...