[cj550]

I saw in another post that the best way to convert miniDV is to edit back to miniDV via the Firewire in- does this mean I capture miniDV footage then put in a blank miniDV tape and send captured footage to that? thanks

[Andy98765]

I get excellent results using Adobe Premiere. http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/

[redsox_mark]

Originally Posted by cj550

I saw in another post that the best way to convert miniDV is to edit back to miniDV via the Firewire in- does this mean I capture miniDV footage then put in a blank miniDV tape and send captured footage to that? thanks

Not sure what you mean by "best way to convert", but yes, if you are editing DV, then for best quality you would save it in DV format. And a convenient way to do that is to output your editted footage back to tape. Using a camcorder which has DV-in (not all do), you would put in a blank tape, turn the camcorder on, and use your editing software to write back out to tape.

You could also render to DV format and copy the edited file to DVD... but you can only fit about 20 mins on a 4.7 GB DVD. You would need Blu-ray to fit all of a 1 hour tape. Or you could leave the files on a HDD drive.

Of course if you want to create a DVD video you still need to convert to MPEG2 and write that to DVD.

[senu]

For clarity:

In short the DV AVI edited on the PC is not converted but returned to MiniDV tape in the camcorder as an archive of your editing. ( captured in reverse if you like)
This can then be recaptured to PC from that tape in the future if needed

Conversion refers to turning the DV Avi into any no of formats: mpeg2 for DVD
WMV, Divx,( mpeg4) Real, Quicktime , other varieties of mpeg 1 and 2 for the purposed of viewing on the PC, sending by email , for web viewing , for use in multimedia projects or to create a video cd in the case of mpeg1

Rendering to DV format is essentially leaving the Dv Avi in the format you captured it in but with the editing in place.
It has to be rendered even though the format is unchanged ( ie not converted) because the originally captured footage is infact left intact , the newly Edited footage needing to be copied from original and edits (titles ,transitions, effects) "created" as NLE software works in a non destructive way.

[cj550]

thanks but i'm confused about the capacity of a 4.7gb dvd. I'm using Pinnacle 9 and I wanted to output my miniDV footage to DVD hoping for around 3.5 hours per DVD- is this not possible?

[redsox_mark]

It is possible but there is a tradeoff in quality.
Anything longer than 1 hour you start to trade off quality to fit more on.
Up to 1.5 hours you generally won't notice. 2 hours it becomes noticable, but still not too bad. 3.5 hours there will be a significant quality drop.

[senu]

Originally Posted by cj550

thanks but i'm confused about the capacity of a 4.7gb dvd. I'm using Pinnacle 9 and I wanted to output my miniDV footage to DVD hoping for around 3.5 hours per DVD- is this not possible?

Just to reiterate what Mark said , reread the last 3 lines of this post from your other thread

[cj550]

thanks understand- I actually made a mistake with the amount of footage I'm putting on each DVD its 1.5 hrs not 3.5 hrs so the quality shouldnt be that bad.

But I've noticed when I use Pinnacle Studio 9 to capture the footage but when I come to make the movie it asks for the tapes to be put back in and it plays them again? has it not already captured the footage? cheers

[senu]

Originally Posted by cj550

......
But I've noticed when I use Pinnacle Studio 9 to capture the footage but when I come to make the movie it asks for the tapes to be put back in and it plays them again? has it not already captured the footage? cheers

What has happened is that you have captured the footage at preview quality and have edited "by proxy"
So the edits are noted and stored but have not been applied to the video footage captured at its best quality

As such the program needs to recapture the best quality video and then apply the edits to it at the stage when it needs to make the DVD as it doesn't want to make a DVD from the previously captured lower quality "preview quality" material

This helps if you have limited space to capture footage as your 90 min will take up just over 18Gb of space, and the render files a bit more. all this can certainly be reclaimed after the project
I've only used it once ( to try it out) and didn't bother after wards as it only adds one more step to the process and can be a serious PITA if you capture from more than one tape
The way to avoid this is to capture at full DV quality in the first place