DVD handycams - Capture footage or just encode?

Musician wrote on 7/17/2008, 8:59 AM

Basic question. A client just send me a DVD from a Sony DVD handycam to be mixed with DV tape. I'm wondering from a editing quality standpoint if it would be better to to play the DVD and capture it with my Canopus ADVC-300 to AVI, or to just edit the VOB files on the disc. Instinct tells me that compressing an already compressed Mpeg-2 is going to result in blocking and artifacts, and that capturing it to an AVI file there will be less breakdown. But one stays entirely digital, and the other gets converted to analog and back. What do you guys think?

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 7/17/2008, 9:37 AM

I would edit with the VOB file. If you want to convert it to DV AVI just do that in Vegas and then edit with the AVI file. Rendering the MPEG to DV AVI will be all digital. I don't see how converting to analog will help.

BTW, I've been handed DVD camera footage to edit and it held up pretty good. I used the Import | DVD Camcorder Disc option and edited the MPEG files right on the timeline.

~jr

johnmeyer wrote on 7/17/2008, 10:12 AM

Edit with the VOB file, for sure. I have seen recommendations in the past about capturing the analog output from DVD players and MPEG-2 camcorders because people were having difficulty with the VOB. I guess if somehow you cannot capture and edit the VOB, then the analog capture is a last-ditch solution, but it really makes no sense. Why? Because when you play the VOB to analog, all the artifacts you are worried about are going to be in the analog capture. And, when you then finish your edit and render, you will be recompressing and adding the same artifacts you wanted to avoid. Thus, you still uncompress the MPEG-2 and you still recompress when you render.

What you will have done, if you do the analog capture, is convert the digital signal to the analog domain and then back to the digital domain. This is two additional conversions, both of which will degrade the picture, and neither of which you will do if you keep the video in the digital domain.

Finally, if you are using Vegas 8, and if you do cuts-only on part of the footage (i.e., no fX, composites, etc.) then the footage will be "smart rendered" and you will end up with ZERO quality degradation, something that is not possible with any other workflow.

Summary: Do not capture by converting to analog. It is a bad idea.

Musician wrote on 7/17/2008, 10:28 AM

Thanks guys. Your approaches both sound logical, and more importantly, efficient and will save me some time. Johnmeyer, I didn't know that mpeg-2 would be smart rendered if there was were no effects added. Is there anything that you have to manually do to make Vegas 8 "smart render", or does it happen automatically? Thanks.