Have I captured my Mini-DV:s correctly?

[Tunanisse]

[Attachment 56624 - Click to enlarge]
[Attachment 56623 - Click to enlarge]Hi!

In 2014 I captured/imported most of my 120+ Mini-DV tapes. It was done via iMovie on the iMac I had at the time, which had a Firewire port. (Unfortunately the iMac broke down a couple of years later, before I had captured all of the tapes.)

Anyway - now I want to make the videos easily accessible over our LAN, so I plan to save the videos on our NAS (Synology).

But to be able to watch them over our LAN, I assume that I need to convert them to another format?

But before I start to convert the files, I just wanted to double check that everything looks OK so that I don't make any rookie mistakes.

(1) Does it look like I captured/imported the tapes correctly? See attached image with information about one of the files (I used MediaInfo to check the file).

(2) If the captured/imported files looks OK, I'm planning to convert them to MP4 in the app Wondershare UniConverter (Same as scource, Original Resolution). Are there any reasons I should consider doing it in another way?

Thank you very much in advance!

Peter

[phelissimo_]

I don't see any files or pictures attached

[Tunanisse]

Sorry! I didn't realize that the images never were uploaded.

[phelissimo_]

No problem.

The captured files look all good. But I don't reccomend using Wondershare UniConverter.
For example you can use HandBrake for easy converting. It also works on Mac.

[Tunanisse]

Thanks! How come you don’t recommend Wondershare UniConverter?

[phelissimo_]

How come you don’t recommend Wondershare UniConverter?

Well, it is one of those crappy converters. There are definetly better options.
You must consider that your videos are interlaced and can/should be deinterlaced with QTGMC or similar
if you want to avoid the scanlines when playing on a device or program not cabable of deinterlacing.

[Cornucopia]

You seem to have captured them fine for a Mac. But note that they appear to be RAW DV files, NOT dv in some standard multimedia container (e.g. Quicktime MOV, or AVI, MXF, etc)*. As such an un-multiplexed stream, they might not be recognizable to some apps. Quicktime-architected apps SHOULD understand it, it being a Mac and all, but you conversion options there are quite limited with modern Macs. Basically, your options would be h264 or h265 compression in a MOV or MP4 container (good for consumer-level playback applications), or upconverting to ProRes in MOV container (good for pro/semi-pro use with editing apps).
This might be ok for you if all the player apps you intend to connect to that server are going to be modern Mac/iOS based.

If more ubiquity and generality is required, you will probably be best served by going with a ffmpeg-based converter and choosing h264 in mp4 with deinterlace processing, such as was recommended with QTGMC.
Don't forget, as dv material, your stuff is ALL interlaced.


Scott

*this is common with iMovie. Contrast that with FCP which captures & stores DV into Type2 quicktime MOV files.

[DB83]

I do not think anyone has discussed this. You said words to the effect "Same as source, original resolution".


I take that you intend to make an mp4 as 720*576 4:3.


The problem with that approach is that your player might not recognise the AR flag and you end up with 5:4 video rather than 4:3. A safer option would be to resize either as 768*576 (which is how your DV video natively appears) or 720*540 with both, but the latter more importantly, de-interlaced BEFORE the resize. Of course you can resize as you wish but retain a 4:3 ratio so 1440*1080 is also viable.

[dellsam34]

Here is how a NTSC DV file from a customer's tape looks like after being de-interlaced with QTGMC, resized to 1440x1080 and encoded to h.264, a PAL source may look little better due to a different chroma subsampling (4:2:0), The NTSC file undergone a chroma sub change from 4:1:1 to 4:2:2 before doing all the steps above, It is better that way than working from 4:1:1 file and the scripts won't accept such files anyway.