Capturing / Digitizing Mini DV as ProRes 422

[Rafael Amador]

there is no advantage on digitizing DV as Prores unless you upscale on capturing (if you gonna use it on an HD sequence), and to do that, yes, you need an AJA, BlackMagic or similar.
Rafael

[Declan Smith]

As the footage source is DV, even if you capture from your device into Prores over firewire, you won’t increase the quality one bit (I guess you know this already). The only thing you gain is less time taken to capture into your desired format.

I would suggest that you could capture to DV then transcode to Prores using Compressor and therefore incur no additional costs (other than the time overhead).

I too prefer to normalise all my footage into the same codec. It makes the entire process much easier.

Declan Smith
https://www.madpanic.tv
After Effects CS6/ FCS3 / Canon XLH1 / Canon 7D / Reason / Cubase

“it’s either binary or it’s not”

[John Moreno]

Thanks for your reply.

I know that usually an edit house would have a tower and a rack going through a blackmagic or AJA via a capture card and will allow for upscaling. Any way to have a set up that will allow upscale and capture via Macbook Pro 17″ ?

Thanks

JM

[John Moreno]

Thanks Delcan for your reply.

It’s been years sine I have worked with Mini DV and I am now remembering how not fun it is.

I have been capturing at DV NTSC and of course I will need to transcode to ProRes but I am having an issue with frame rate.

The material was shot 24p on a Panasonic DVX. I am using DV NTSC w/ Advance 2:3:3:2 Pulldown capture setting and the material is coming in at 29.97. I have tried capturing at 23:98 but I get issues with audio sync, etc.

What would be the option to capture at it’s native frame rate?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[Nick Meyers]

what i would do about the DV to HD is to take the tapes to a post house,
and have them capture while passing the signal through a terenex hardware up-scaler.

i’d capture whole tapes as Prores HQ.

i’ll admit i’m lucky in that i have close ties to a post house that would allow me to supervise this directly.

i’ll also admit i know nothing about 23.976 to 29.97, pull-downs etc
maybe that can be dealt with during the capture, i don’t know.

nick

[Tom Matthies]

I don’t believe that that the earlier (or any) DVX-100 cameras actually recorded at a true 24 FPS rate. I think they actually recorded 24 over 30. Your 24fps footage is likely 29.97fps in reality.

E=MC2+/-2db

[Rafael Amador]

[Tom Matthies] “I don’t believe that that the earlier (or any) DVX-100 cameras actually recorded at a true 24 FPS rate. I think they actually recorded 24 over 30. Your 24fps footage is likely 29.97fps in reality.”
Tape based formats are built to records standard NTSC (29,987ps). The drum spins 29,97 times per second.
If 23,98fps is implemented, pull-down must be added because the drum keeps spinning at the same 29,97 revolutions.
To get a tape camcorder recording real 23,98fps all the mechanic part (engines, drum, captan..) would be different. That would make more expensive the device. Using an standard camcorder and adding pull-down was the most economic solution.
rafael