Copying Hi-8 to DVD - a question.

[SoundBox]

last night I was dubbing some of my camorder Hi-8 tapes (on a Sony TRV913 Hi-8 model) to my Panasonic EH60 recorder (to the hard drive at maximum quality via AV 3 S-VHS input on the back). The Hi-8 tapes (or any other tape I suppose) will inherently have 'noise' or visible grain - especially in dark scenes. Not sure if the DVD recorder sees this as 'action' and tries to record it faithfully...

Well, after dubbing to disk I recorded it to DVD-R and played back. Was impressed - looks almost like the original tape. However when I zoomed in to 4X using my Pioneer 575 player it looked a bit 'pixely' - there was some block noise - a bit like Freeview on lesser channels.

When I checked the bit-rate it was very high (atound 10 MBPS) - much more than a shop bought DVD. Shop bought DVD's with a lower bit-rate seem to have a lower pixilation at 4X zoom though.

So, am I seeing the 'pixels' of the Hi-8 recorder, the recorder struggling with a rather noisy format or the natural limitation of DVD compression?

any info appreciated.

Ian

[vonhosen]

Originally Posted by SoundBox

So, am I seeing the 'pixels' of the Hi-8 recorder, the recorder struggling with a rather noisy format or the natural limitation of DVD compression?

Both.

Remember studios have optimum equipment & conditions. They'll be using very expensive high res cameras under good lighting conditions to get quality clean footage, They will be using expensive post proceedures to prepare the footage specifically for each destination format. They will be using expensive encoders & authoring software/hardware which will allow them multi pass VBR encoding & encoding in very small sections for the most demanding scenes to optimise bit rate management further.