DV Capture Problems!

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oneonetwothree

Member
Long time listener, first time caller here. Hoping to get some opinions.

Some background:
I shot a project on Super 16mm film. It was given a best-light 2k telecine transfer to DigiBeta. I made a clone of that DigiBeta tape to a DV tape, so that I could edit at home on my Mac. I'm using Final Cut Studio 2, and capturing with a Sony PD-170 via firewire.

The issue involves compression. Although my footage is on a DV tape, using standard DV capture settings in Final Cut seems to cause a drastic loss in quality by the time it ends up on my computer. Contrast, color, and image fidelity in general just seem to suffer in the capture process. I exported the footage to a DVD (highest quality settings possible) and then compared it to the souce tape. The captured footage definitely looks like crap in comparison. Yet, I'm told by some at my school that DV is DV, and that no further compression is made once it is committed to a DV tape. They say a DV tape is no different from DV captured on a computer, yet my eyes tell me otherwise.

Is Final Cut compressing the video further during capture? If so, how can I avoid this? It's bad enough that I have to edit from DV after having a pretty DigiBeta master tape, so I'd like to maintain the highest quality possible. Hard drive space is not an issue.

I'm able to choose what compression type I want if I customize the sequence/capture settings, but if i choose something like "Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2," I get an error that aborts capture immediately. Most compression choices appear to relate to HD footage, which obviously won't work for this project.

Any ideas?
 
Are you judging DV by the way it looks in your computer, or the way it looks back out to tape? DV has a low quality playback setting which was necessary back when computers were slower, but when streamed back out to firewire is full quality. You can turn it off by checking high quality in the Quicktime properties menu. Also in final cut if you select High Quality in the RT menu it will look much better, instead of Dynamic, which will play your footage at the highest quality it thinks your computer can handle, which could be crap.
 
As far as I can tell, it is not a playback issue. I don't have it set up to test this by directly streaming to a monitor or the camera via firewire, though. Exporting the captured footage, uncompressed, and viewing in any video software (not to mention DVD, which is what I need it to look good on) shows a loss in quality.

I'm able to select "none" for a compression option in the capture/sequence settings, which is what I want, but then every time I capture now I get an error that reads, "dropped frames were detected during the last capture attempt," and no footage is capture.

Do I have to play around with drop/non-drop settings to avoid this? or is the error some kind of larger issue with the fact that I am trying to avoid capturing with the standard DV easysetting? arg!
 
When you capture into FCP from miniDV, you are basically reading the digital bits on the tape in their original format. There should be NO loss in quality from the DV tape to your computer as it is basically a clone of digital information. If your footage looks crappy on tape, it ain't gonna look any better. Open your footage in Quicktime. Go to window>Show Movie properties. Select Video Track, then the visual settings tab below. Check the High Quality button. If the video in your playback window still looks crappy, then that's how it looks on tape.
 
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