DV to DVD transfer w/JVC M10 questions

[nathanaa]

A friend of mine who knows I've got a JVC M10 and a DVD burner asked me if I could help him transfer his wedding videos (from his brothers digital video camera) onto DVD. He doesn't want to record to VHS and then convert to DVD (his original plan, until he saw my stuff a few weeks ago), as he would lose a lot of quality that way obviously.

I told him I'd be happy to help. I've got the M10 of course, but I've also got a laptop with a firewire port. I've not done any DV->DVD transfers yet, but I do have TMPGEnc and TMPGEnc DVD Author.

I'm wondering, which would be easier and/or the better method, to transfer the video to a DVD-RW using the M10 and then authoring on the laptop, or just transfering the video directly to the laptop and then converting it to <MPEG2?> format.

I know how to use my recently-acquired M10 for VHS transfers, but that's as much as I've done with it so far. But what will the video transfered from the DV onto the DVD-RW be format wise? If it will be as simple as just dumping the video to the M10 and then authoring, heck, I've done that with all my old VHS wedding videos and I'm comfortable with that.

Or would dumping it right to the HDD on my laptop keep better quality? I want to do the best job I can for my friend (hey, these are his wedding vid's right?), so any help or advice is greatly appreciated folks!

[gshelley61]

Personally, I would transfer all the footage via firewire (or s-video analog input, if you prefer) at 1 hour XP mode to DVD-R's with the JVC... sort of an archive, if you will. Then author on the laptop. It's very hard to beat the high bitrate MPEG2 recording quality of the JVC.

[nathanaa]

See, now that's kind of what I thought too, that the quality I've gotten out of the M10 has been so good, why muck about trying to get a bit better. But as I said, I've never done a DV transfer yet, so I wasn't sure about it.

There is one other thing though - if I put it on XP mode (1 hour) how much will one DVD-R hold? Just one hour's worth of video, or is that the rate at which it records it? I'm still a bit unclear on this aspect. I've mostly just been recording on the 2 hour mode or less, transfering my tapes hasn't needed anything better or worse really.

[gshelley61]

XP will be 1 hour. The reason you want to use XP for the wedding video raw footage is that hand held camcorder images are never really still, so it takes lots of bitrate to avoid macroblocks during the encoding. If you try to transfer two hours worth of hand held camcorder footage in SP mode, the MPEG2 will have blocking artifacts.

[lordsmurf]

Try some FR modes. Knock it down to the earliest 352x480 res, if you're going for max space, and the bitrate should be almost superbit-ish there.