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  1. Hi forum,

    three questions:

    1. Does both WinDV and Premier Pro extract the native stream that sits on a MiniDV tape?

    2. Is there any loss of quality or quality difference by using WinDV instead of Premier Pro?

    3. Do you guys use Type 1 or Type 2 stream?

    thank you in advance.
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  2. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    1. Yes, both apps capture the raw dv stream from the Firewire cable. No DV apps "digitize" however, as the signal is already digital.

    2. No, since both apps, and any DV-type app, is merely capturing the stream, not re-encoding it. The only differences might be in choice of saving as Raw dv stream, saving as muxed in a multimedia container as type1 or muxed as type2 and there is no difference in quality between those formats. Possible that there is a difference in quality of error-prone streams if the apps have better or worse error-correction algorithms.

    3. Totally dependent on the app, though most early DV apps used type1 because it was less hardware intensive during capturing. Most modern apps are type2, as they don't really need to worry about that anymore (advances in horsepower) and using type2 makes it more compatible with expectations of standard video usage.


    Scott
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  3. Thanks Scott for the reply, it really help me understand the things and you prob just saved me some $, as I was under the impression that fancy software like Premier Pro will give you a better quality.

    1 quick question, is the RAW minidv stream the avi file that WinDV outputs or that avi is already using a codec? Can you help me understand more about the codec or compression that the raw minidv stream uses?

    thanks again
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  4. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    DV.
    A type of DCT compression, which compresses ~5.1:1 compared to uncompressed 8bit YUV 4:2:0. With LPCM stereo audio and additional metadata added on it fills out to 25Mbps (CBR) or close to 13GB/hour. The codec in these cases is already in the camera, so the stream coming from firewire is pre-compressed. Internally, that stream is also pre-multiplexed using DV's own scheme, so the raw dv file which looks to have only 1 stream actually has V + A + extra (TC, etc).
    Type 1 just. wraps that in a container (so, doubly-muxed) in an IVAS-labeled stream.
    Type 2 does a similar thing, but labels it a VIDS (video) stream, and then pulls a copy of the embedded audio and creates an accompanying AUDS (audio) stream. This looks to most apps like standard multiplexed V + A streams in a container.

    Scott
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  5. Capturing Memories dellsam34's Avatar
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    ScenlizerLive is a pretty good app, it is more advanced than WinDV and less complicated than Premiere, It works pretty well for transferring DV from and to camcorder easily and you have camcorder buttons to control the camcorder from the app just like Premiere.
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  6. Scott,
    thank you so much for the schooling. so the end result of .avi file have the native dv stream wrapped under it, and I assume modern player such as VLC will have the proper codec to decode the dc compression right?

    Dellsam34,
    I checked out the ScelizerLive, awesome app but it might confuse things as I am just looking to dump each MiniDV tape to a single .avi file without any editing and as high quality as possible. But none the less, very impressive app. Thanks for mentioning.
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  7. Capturing Memories dellsam34's Avatar
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    The editing part of SClive is just to cut off unwanted scenes losslessly and can be disabled, It does not transcode like NLE software.
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  8. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    DV would probably now be considered a "legacy" codec, and so modern OSes may or may not support it natively. On Macs, it *SHOULD* support it via QuickTime X. On Windows, it probably supports it in DirectShow/MediaFoundation, but possibly no longer in VCM. If that is the case, you can always install a 3rd party DV codec such as Cedocida, which is a very good quality opensource version.

    Apps such as VLC often have their own store of codecs, not relying on the OS. IIRC VLC uses libav libraries (ffmpeg uses a fork of it also, IIRC). If those libraries support the DV codec, so does the app. It is fairly simple to retain the capability, especially since little has changed on the DV development front, so I would expect it to not remove support unless it truly were archaic & defunct.

    dellsam34 will probably mention it, but AFAIK SCLive also has the ability to save as single file if that's what you want.


    Scott
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  9. Hi, WinDV and SCLive are made in the winxp era, which almost certain means they are 32 bit.
    Since most OS after Win 7+ are 64 bit, does that mean the software will pad the data stream to 64 bit also or does it leave the data stream it captures at 32 bit?
    Will any of these distort the original quality?

    thanks.

    ps, i ended up using WinDV since my requirements are very simple in capturing 1 dv tape per file. I tried SCLive but the menu confused me a little, guess it had a learning curve.
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  10. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    1. The bitdepth an app is has little to no bearing on the bitdepth of the data it is working on.

    2. Because of built-in backwards compatibility, it is very rare for there to be any issue in using a 32bit app in a 64bit OS, other than performance. Certainly not data file corruption or quality compromise.

    3. Most multimedia data file formats are, surprise surprise, inherently 32bit so far. But that wouldn't matter except in those few cases of necessity like extreme runtime length. Example: WAV (32bit) vs. W64/R64 (64bit).

    4. Given rule #2, the majority of apps still in current use for multimedia are still 32bit. Premiere is now 64bit, and it is a complex enough app to where the performance boost of 64bit makes sense.

    5. Bigger isn't always better, and there is nothing magical in 64bit over 32bit, just as there wasn't with 32bit over 16bit, or even 16bit over 8bit. It has much more to do with performance and with applicability to scalable datasets. Heck, we all still daily work with 8bit ASCII code! Use the correct tool for the job.


    Scott
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  11. Thank you.
    It took a really long time but i was finally able to manage to get what I need done since everything is captured at real time only.
    I started to use WinDV but managed to use SCLive to cut some stuff out. For whatever reason, the video captured via SClive is slightly more pixelated during movements.

    But thank you for sharing the expertise on this matter, and spending the time to explain the in depth concept to me. Cornucopia check your private message.
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