Capturing Mini DV from Canon HV20

[Alwyn]

Plenty of twisting of nickers here. Again, I am not suggesting or encouraging anybody to do anything. I merely commented on njsteve's desire to remove the black bars. The ideological blockheads of the forum can't see that I was actually showing him why he SHOULDN'T crop or stretch.

That said, I have on occasions cropped 4:3 to 16:9 and you wouldn't know the difference. If there's no valuable video at the top or bottom of a 4:3, it is not a heinous crime to crop it off to 16:9, especially when it means the areas of interest are closer because of the zoom.

When talking about TV Shows, we must respect what the director wanted. In Europe we (fans) did a "revolution" when Thunderbirds was release in UK butchering the top and bottom of the frame to fit widescreen TVs, and we all bought Japanese 4:3 Blue Rays. Same when UFO was broadcasted mutilated in US HDTV (https://ufoseries.com/hdtv/).

Get real Lollo, we're NOT talking about TV shows. So many threads on this site ends up in a general rant and rave because you lot can't stay on topic.

When talking about personal video, you choose what you want to be in the frame accoding to your "artistic" choise. Butchering the frame is never an option.

No, it's MY video, I'll do what I like with it.

here is an AR 2.66 music video, would you crop it to 16:9 too?

No. Why would I?

Duh!

I suggest you wind back the insults. That was uncalled-for.

[Alwyn]

Strangely when I created the final mp4 file merging all the .avi files it produced a smaller .mp4 than Elgato did.

The difference is simply a function of encoding bitrate. The Elgato, on the mode/quality it is set to, produces 1.3GB per hour. MOVAVI will have a setting somewhere that allows you to adjust the encoding bitrate.

I think 750MB for a ~40 minute video is a bit low; I think the 1.3GB per hour bitrate of the Elgato is better, but then again, modern TVs do such a great job of video playback, 750 might be OK, especially if it's going to be watched once and forgotten about!

The HD Tape came out much better using HDVSplit. That one was drastic.

The MPEG 2 format of HDV is much more efficient than DV, so for the same bitrate (~13GB per hour), HDV will be a lot clearer/sharper because it's packing in 4 times more effective pixels (1920x1080) than DV (720x540). For the ideologues, I've simplified those numbers for the discussion.

[Bwaak]

Duh!

I suggest you wind back the insults. That was uncalled-for.

"Duh!" was an uncalled for insult? How come, and whom did I insult?

HDV will be a lot clearer/sharper because it's packing in 4 times more effective pixels (1920x1080) than DV (720x540). For the ideologues, I've simplified those numbers for the discussion.

HDV is 1440x1080. If you call this simplification I am not going to object, considering that 1440x1080 indeed packs four times more pixels than 720x540

[lollo]

So many threads on this site ends up in a general rant and rave because you lot can't stay on topic.

I disagree. Many threads turn into rant when people start proposing low quality/bad/crap processing solutions, and try to defend them.
VideoHelp forums have good reputation for "quality solutions", we should no turn them into generic/some YouTube lousy suggestions.