High Speed Dubs/Copy

[lurcher]

When I look at the specs of DVD recorders with built in Hd"s I see most of them are capable of high speed copy to dvd-R etc. Quotes of 32/48/64 x noticed.
In simple terms what is the criteria for copying at the highest speed ?
Can you for instance record something to hd at xp quality and high speed copy in same quality (is copy speed dependent on x speed of blank media ?.
Little confused on this issue.
Are all the manufacturers offering the same thing ?

Thanks

[johnmccoy]

As long as you are not re-encoding i.e. going from one quaility setting to another, and the size of the programme is not larger than the disc capacity, then high speed copying (dubbing on some systems) will work at the speed rating of the disc or the machines top writing speed, whichever is lower. E.g a 8x disc in a 16x recorder will only copy at 8x. If you are re-encoding then copying is in real-time i.e. a two hours programme will take two hours to copy (I think, I've never done this yet!).
I don't know where the speeds of 32/48/64 come from - the fastest DVD discs are 16x, and most writers are still only 8x, perhaps you are looking at CD not DVD speeds.

[ArtS]

Media speed determines phisical speed of recording. But, you must remember, that media speed is calculated for 1h recording mode on 4.7 GB disc. If you can fast copy title recorded in LP, you must multiply media speed and recording mode factor. E.g. if you have DVD with 4x speed and you have title recorded in HQ (XP), you can fast copy it with 1 (1h mode) x 4 (media speed) = 4, it means 1x4=4. If you want to fast copy SP title then calculation is 2 (2h mode) x 4 (media speed) = 8. If you do the same with LP, it will be 4 (4h mode) x 4 (media speed) = 16. And so on, and so on... Anyway, if you want to fast dub titles, which size is equal to DVD disc space, you will need 15 mins for 4x media.

ArtS

[AVmaster]

The quickest out there mainly seem to be the Panny's with their 64x speed dubbing, but with all HDD/DVD recorders the dubbing speed is determined by the recording mode used just like ArtS says.
This means that they are only 64x in the lowest recording mode as the recording contains less data than in a higher quality recording mode. So although a 1hr program can be dubbed in 56 seconds on EP mode, it takes 15 minutes at 4x in XP mode as the better quality XP recording contains more data.

[lurcher]

Thanks to all above for that useful info - I think I"ve got in now.