difference between converting from dv/uncompressed to mpg2

[ff5]

is there a noticeable difference in quality passing from one format or the other? i'm just uncertain as to wait to get a good card to capture uncompressed video or stick with what i have and do some dvd's from dv videos.

5

[edDV]

is there a noticeable difference in quality passing from one format or the other? i'm just uncertain as to wait to get a good card to capture uncompressed video or stick with what i have and do some dvd's from dv videos.

5

Unless you are doing some unusual filtering, you will get best results staying with the original DV created in the camera, then transferred over IEEE-1394. No capture is necessary. It is already digital video and audio.

DV matches DVD format closely. Levels match for YUV, PCM 16 bit 48Khz sound is a match. Edit in DV. Encode to MPeg2 and you are done.

DV & DVD levels: YUV, 8bit/component, black=16, white=235
DV & DVD size: 720x480 (4:3 or 16:9)
DV & DVD sound: 16bit, 48KHz

[redwudz]

What edDV said. Uncompressed AVI is about 112Gb/hour. DV is about 13Gb/hour. One good reason to use DV.

If you use a capture card and capture to AVI in a compressed format such as Huffy or a more compact AVI format such as PIC Video, you may have better quality than DV. It depends on your source video. If it's DV, you will gain nothing.

Capping from a VHS tape is not usually a high quality source and DV would be fine. HDTV would be a example of a high quality source and a capture card should give better results than DV, depending on the capture format, but with a lot more work and HD space needed. If you want to learn about capture cards and their quality, http://digitalfaq.com/ is a good place to start.

[edDV]

I was assuming source was a DV camcorder or analog to DV capture device.

[Capt.Video]

Like they were saying, your best bet is DV to MPEG2, and skip the capture cards all together.

I have TRV120 by Sony and use the "pass through" feature when backing up VHS tapes. Ive tried just about everything, and only this gives the BEST quality results with full D1, no drop frames and perfect A/V sync.

Good luck,
Andrew