Capturing DV and make it look its best.

[videojoe03]

Has any one else noticed this.

If you capture DV using firewire, which you would think would be the best quality because it keeps the DV in its native "untouched" format, it doesnt look that good, but....

If you go out of your DV deck using component or SDI, and capturing in the format of your choice, DV or not, the quality is soooo much better.

Try is sometime if you have a DV deck and capture card with the right connections. I did it all the time when i shot with a DSR-570WS and ran it along side other stuff on Digibeta all the time. Running my DV through anything BUT firewire always greatly increased by capture quality, no matter what my mac compression settings were.

 

[BenB]

When you capture DV from Firewire, you're only downloading digital data. There is no way to have image quality issues. It's just one's and zero's.

When you capture from component, you're capturing analog video and audio streams. If you are capturing live from the camera, you're bypassing the digitization in the camera. If you are capturing component from tape, you're getting the same image from the digital data on the tape you get via FW.

You capture card may have some clean up circuitry on it that may or may not help the image. It also depends on what you are viewing the image on. Your computer monitor lies, is not interlaced, does not work like an NTSC CRT does, so you can never judge by that. You have to use an external post production NTSC monitor to really know the truth about what your NTSC footage looks like.

But capturing DV tape via FW, there is no image quality change at all, it's simply a data transfer.