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Best Capture Settings/Format from MiniDV
Ok… So my school had a concert recently, 5 camera production total of 10 fully used up MiniDv tapes recording in SP and in widescreen SD format in PAL, I think recorded in 25 frames.
My question now is that, what is the best capture settings for each of them, which retains the quality of the footage? Let’s say I wouldn’t mind using up 15-20gigs per hour/per tape for footage only, excluding audio. I have my audio recorded separately.
The standard FCP import format is DV-PAL right? Are there any better formats which answer my question above?
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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DV/PAL is a lossless transfer. Capture via firewire, choose the DV/PAL easy setup…good to go. And this will eat up merely 12MB/s…less, because PAL has less fps than NTSC.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Shane Ross] “…less, because PAL has less fps than NTSC. “
Hi
For 25fps DV, Less fps is offset by More Vertical Line Resolution.When I was at school I would then have applied Cleuth’s Constant… 😉
(That’s the variable number you have to multiply your answer by to get the correct result).In ITU-R BT.601 terms that number is achieved by using a differing non-square pixel aspect ratio for 25 or 29.97fps data streams – x10/11 for 29.97 and x59/54 for 25fps.
So all DV/DVCAM datastreams (29.97 or 25fps) have identical bitrates. 🙂
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Thank you all for the info, but playing the footage using DV-PAL, it seems such bad quality…
Any idea’s why? -
Well, first off, when you capture DV/PAL into FCP via firewire, it is a direct file transfer, it is digital data. So there is zero quality loss when you capture. As to why it looks bad when you look at it on the computer monitor?
#2 Blurry Playback
Shane’s Stock Answer #2: Blurry playback
ONLY JUDGE THE QUALITY OF YOUR MATERIAL ON AN EXTERNAL BROADCAST MONITOR, OR AT LEAST A TV.
The Canvas shows you what happens after the codec you are working with has been applied. The Viewer shows you the material in its native format. Once you drop the footage from the Viewer into the timeline, it inherits the attributes of the sequence. If it is a DV sequence, the footage will render out as DV.
1. Disable overlays on the Canvas.
2. Make sure you’ve rendered everything (no green bars at the top of the timeline).
Video playback requires large amounts of data and many computations. In order to maintain frame rate and be viewable at a normal size, only about one-fourth of the DV data is used in displaying the movie to the screen. However, the DV footage is still at full quality, and is best viewed thru a TV or broadcast monitor routed thru your camera or deck.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
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