Choice of capture methods - which one?
 

I have a MiniDV camcorder (with firewire port) and want to capture tapes to a digital format that can be watched on a smartTV. There are two ways I can go. (1) I have a Canopus ADVC110 capture box, or (2) I have a Hauppauge USB Live 2. Which will give me the best result?

(3) MiniDV to computer via firewire port. It’s gonna be a 1:1 digital copy of your footage.

facp is correct. MiniDV is a lossy DV source. It is never captured or re-recorded unless you want a serious quality hit that will look like poop. FireWire with transfer software such as WinDV is a 1:1 copy with no added data loss, not a capture.

DV is an obsolete format no longer supported without adding DV codecs to the OS. It is not playable on set top players, smart TV's or on the internet. You have to encode your DV transfer to MPEG (universally playable everywhere) or to h.264 for playback on BD players or smart tv's that can recognize h.264.

Thank you. So, since I can get either the DV AVI or the .TS onto my PC, which converts with best quality to h.264?

Don't capture lossy DV to .ts. That one lossy format to another, which will cause you no end of noise and color problems. I don't think you quite get it. MiniDV is copied to a DV-AVI container.

After you have a 1:1 copy of your DV on a computer there are dozens of NLE editors that can edit and encode the original to many other playable formats. Free editors are very uneven in quality, poor in features, and usually assume that you have some advanced knowledge of video properties and procedures. I suggest that you try something inexpensive but which has decent quality, such as the Corel software line, and get into its user manual to find out what you're doing.

Thank you very much

I am joining into this conversation as I am trying to do the same thing. I want to do 1:1 copies of my DV tapes onto my iMAC. I have been using iMovie and Final Cut Pro (FCP) but they seem to only "Import" the DV, separate it into many scenes and keep them within FCP as many .MOV "files".

I was able to do a DV to .AVI copy (single file ~13GB per hour) on my Windows machine a few years ago but have now switched to iMAC FCP. Can someone tell me the best software to do this on the iMAC ? I have the Firewire to Thunderbolt connections working.

What iMac model do you have? OSX version? In my opinion, you might be better off borrowing or acquiring an old Windows PC with firewire. That thunderbolt to firewire adapter is a bit of a hit or miss.

What FCP does is quite normal, it's the same with other programs. This is caused by timecode breaks. You need to merge all the clips into one single clip and reconstruct the timecode by encoding the audio stream. You don't need to re-encode the video stream.



You don't need a Windows PC for something like this. Importing DV video is quite a straightforward procedure. A Windows machine is only recommended for capturing analog.