Do capture cards give better quality input source than firewire?

[John]

[Sean ONeil] “BUT… there is a filter in FCP called 4:1:1 Chroma Smoother which is known to smooth out the artifacts just like an HD-SDI capture would do.”

Does this work with HDV footage which is 4:2:0?

Also.. I don’t think anyone meant to imply that a FW transfer is lossy. It is, as you say, a perfect transfer. The issue is with HDV and whether this highly compressed format is viable for editing HD material. Unlike DV, HDV footage gets decompressed and recompressed every time you make a cut. So.. if you capture and edit in HDV, how are you going to up-sample your final edited material to a 4:2:2 color space without FCP first re-compressing every frame of the HDV material first, thus losing a generation?

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[Sean Oneil]

[John] “Does this work with HDV footage which is 4:2:0?”

I have no idea. But one thing I know, what was true for DV may not be true for HDV as far as the chroma smoothing effect from using SDI. Since HDV decks don’t even come w/ SDI, we may be talking about apples and oranges here.

[John] “Also.. I don’t think anyone meant to imply that a FW transfer is lossy. It is, as you say, a perfect transfer. The issue is with HDV and whether this highly compressed format is viable for editing HD materia”

Actually, look at the title of the topic. Then see all the replies saying “Yes”. I’m in 100% agreement that it’s better to capture in a normal format rather than edit in HDV. But capture cards do not “give better quality input source than firewire”.