What is the Highest Quality method to capture DV Tape for editing

N

NorthOf49th

New member
Hi All: I am trying to keep the best original to work with for editing. I have to capture SD from miniDV and can then take the footage into Premiere or Liquid Pro or I could go FCP as well. As DV is 25 Mbps, capturing that bitrate in MPEG2 makes huge files. Going to 7 or 8 Mbps in MPEG2, which is about the best bitrate for DVD encoding, leaves me with much softer looking files.:(

My question is whether it is not better to encode/capture with Windows Media Encoder 9 at a setting of ~5300 Mbps - a High Def encoding preset for 720x480. Does anyone know how this compares with MPEG2 or AVI? Both Liquid Pro and Premiere will accept WMV encoded files. I made 1 test with WM9 encoding as above and ~58 min of DV became 2.3GB of WMV.

Is there any info on how the various Codecs compare at various bitrates? I understand that WMV is based on VC-1 which is supposed to be much more efficient than MPEG2. Any thoughts/advice on the above would be much appreciated!:dankk2:
 
If you are at all concerned about quality, don't transcode until you are done with all your editing. The "capture" from the camera is a digital transfer if you use the DV AVI format, exactly what the camera put on the tape, weighing in at about 13GB/hour. Edit that in Premiere or whatever, and transcode when you are done to your final output format.
 
Capture and edit natively as DV over Firewire.

Once you have completed your edit, (only) then compress appropriately for your distribution method. If you are distributing on DVD, then you will need to compress to MPEG2, within the DVD standards. Internet delivery will require something else like WMV, QT, etc..

- Mikko
 
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