MPEG-2 to DV

Widetrack wrote on 9/25/2002, 7:08 PM

Any gurus out there know if I lose image quality by recording to DV tape right off a DVD playing MPEG-2?

If I capture that DV and edit it slightly, only the edited parts get re-rendered by Vegas, right? So I could print the whole thing back to DV with no recompression except for what occurs when I record to DV, right?

WT

Comments

riredale wrote on 9/29/2002, 11:31 PM

Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You want to play a DVD, and record the output of the DVD player to the DV format, presumably by using a miniDV camera, right?

Then that means you are hooking up your cables so that the analog output of the DVD player is feeding into the side of your camcorder. That means that the MPEG2-encoded DVD is nonetheless going to analog and then into DV format on the camcorder tape.

For one thing, I suspect that the analog output from your DVD player will have Macrovision encoding, which will mess up any attempt to record it unless you use one of those $10 "stabilizer" boxes. Secondly, DV and DVD are two entirely different animals. DVD uses MPEG-2 encoding, which is entirely different from the DV encoding format. The digital information on the DVD disk cannot transfer over to the camcorder directly. It must come out of the player as analog.

If you record the analog video into your camcorder, there will be a slight degradation due to the extra recoding step. But DV encoding is pretty transparent, so the image you put on tape will look very much like the image coming out of the DVD player. Now, once you have your DV-encoded video, you can pass that over to an NLE like VegasVideo, play with it, and put it back on tape. THEN you're correct; the only parts of the video that have to be re-encoded into DV are the transitions and such.