DCR-TRV460 Firewire or S-Video?
 

Hey yall,

I would like to archive a set of Video8 and Super8 tapes using a Sony DCR-TRV460 Handycam. I was wondering which one of the setups will yield higher quality archival footage?

A) Sony DCR-TRV460 S-Video -> Diamond VC500 -> Virtualdub w/ Huffyuv or Lagarith
B) Sony DCR-TRV460 Firewire -> Quicktime -> ProRes

My assumption is that method A suffers quality loss from the ADC in the Diamond VC500, but after that it benefits from lossless encoding for the final file.

My other assumption is that method B suffers quality loss from the DCR-TRV460's ADC it uses to convert the analog tapes to digital out through the Firewire port, as well as Quicktime's ProRes encoding.

Would appreciate any insights, thank you!

ADC in A is as lossless as it gets, AVI 4:2:2 chroma subsampling and uncompressed or compressed lossless video. While the ADC in B is AVI 4:1:1 for NTSC or 4:2:0 for PAL chroma sub, lossy compressed DV codec, The choice is yours.

Hey @latreche34 that makes sense, didn't know those subsampling numbers thank you!

I'm guessing for MiniDV tapes I should go with the firewire setup as they are already digital, plugged into some program that captures with a lossless codec like dvgrab, windv, or virtualdub.

Correct. The same applies to Digital8 tapes.