Transfer or capture DV tape?

[GreenAcres]

After reading on the forum I'm assuming the quality of a DV Tape conversion to DVD is better if it is transferred via firewire and then encoded to mpeg2 and then authored to DVD. In order for me to do this I will need to buy a firewire PCI card and TMPG. The only "editing" I will be doing is cut and splice and titling which I can do in mpeg2 via VideoReDo. My question is this; Is there a substantial quality improvement using the above mentioned method versus just capturing with my ATI AIW card via S-video and letting MMC encode to DVD compliant mpeg2.

[robjv1]

It will certainly make a difference -- whether or not it is substantial depends mostly on bitrate and your tapes. What bitrate and amount of footage per disc are you planning on? If the bitrate is high enough, you'd see less of a difference between the two methods.

What kind of footage is this -- home movies? Are they shot using a tripod in good conditions or more like handheld footage of a kids soccer game on a dark, windy day? Footage shot in low light conditions on a camera that produces a grainy image in those conditions can give encoders fits on a real time encode. The more unstable the footage, the more likely you'll benefit from transferring via FireWire and giving it a high bitrate two pass MPEG 2 encode. If the footage is stellar and the target format is DVD anyway, you can get away with it most likely.

[GreenAcres]

Quote:

Originally Posted by robjv1

What bitrate and amount of footage per disc are you planning on?

I was planning on a bit rate of around 8500, about an hour per disc.

Quote:

What kind of footage is this -- home movies?

Yes, they are home movies.

Quote:

Are they shot using a tripod in good conditions or more like handheld footage of a kids soccer game on a dark, windy day?

Looks like most of them are not shot using a tripod. Might be some low light conditions. He had a pretty steady hand and didn't do a lot of rapid back and forth panning.

Should a Pentium 3 with an IDE hard drive be able to transfer this via firewire? I tried to transfer with this computer and DV Capture and I was dropping some frames (maybe 100 over 15 minutes). This is the same setup I used with Vdub to capture Huffyuv and I never dropped any frames. Would different capture software help? Are some firewire cards better than others?

[volksjager]

a Pentium 3 is insufficient - you will need at least a P4

[GreenAcres]

As a workaround to my "too slow" P3 computer I found a different transfer software that doesn't drop frames. However, the problem is that it saves the file as .DV instead of AVI. I'm assuming that this is a Panasonic DV codec since it's a Panasonic camera? The trouble is (besides my lack of knowledge) TMPGE doesn't recognize the .DV file. I downloaded and installed the DV codec but I still couldn't get it to work. I read on this forum that AVI is a "wrapper" for DV files so I'm thinking that my file is just missing the wrapper? Is there a way to add the AVI wrapper or a way to get TMPGE to recognize the DV file? The final file will be MPEG2.

[volksjager]

i still would highly recommend a better capture PC
P4's are obsolete and are dirt cheap - look on Craplist or at yard sales
should be able to get a working P4 for $25 - ive even seen them free

[GreenAcres]

I was able to find a P4 computer. I'm not dropping frames but now when I capture using winDV it splits the catpure file into multiple files. Not sure why it's doing this but after two minutes of capture I had about 6 different AVI files of various sizes. This would be a lot more work to try and join them together. Why would this happen?

[NJRoadfan]

By default, WinDV splits files based on timecode of the video (a crude method of scene splitting) and by a maximum number of frames. If you want one continuous file, set "Discontinuity Threshold" to 0 and "Max AVI size (frames)" to 117000 (about 65 mins worth of video, a safe value for SP speed DV tapes)

When I make DVDs from DV tapes I stick with the one tape = one DVD rule since I can max out the bitrate. I also go the extra step and extract the date/time data from the tape and add it in as a subtitle on the DVD. That way the viewer can see when the video was recorded with a push of a button. Sadly doing this is not straight forward with DVD Workshop as it doesn't support the common subtitle formats that exist out there.

[GreenAcres]

Thanks NJ. Very helpful.