Importing and Exporting mini DV tapes

[Grant Dawson]

Hi Scott
Sorry its been a while since ive imported DV video but ill give it my best.

1) for DV video its just basic, you either get DV-NTSC (north america) or DV-PAL (Australia, and a few others). From you logging screen you can either log clips individually or just log the whole tape. Pros and Cons being, entering clips means you don’t get the garbage you don’t need taking up precious hard drive space, but you will prob have to sit there and watch the whole tape to set your in and out points. And if you log the whole tape it will take up more space but you then be cutting from the once clip constantly, which isn’t a big deal.
Personally id log the clips individually, but having said that I would edit all the garbage out and turn that 1hr digi tape into a 10min clip.

2) As far as exporting, to be honest DV is pretty bad compared to todays standards. If you want it to be the best then go as Uncompressed AVI but really I would prob go a MP4 with codec H.264 it will take up way way less space and the quality will be pretty much the same. But what I would recommend is try both and see for your self.

3) You can upscale a tad but unfortunately you will also upscale all the imperfections as well and the quality can look pretty bad.

4) I would also recommend a Quicktime MOV or MP4 for this. Almost everything reads MP4 file format nowday’s if not there is always faithfull Windows AVI

Hope this helps

[Tero Ahlfors]

If you capture DV in Premiere it will be DV-PAL. MOV on a mac and AVI on Windows. As far as I know you can’t capture straight to H.264 and why would anyone even want to do that.

[Scott David]

Thanks Greg for the reply! You gave me a lot of information. I have been doing some research and it appears a 1 hr uncompressed avi file can take up as much as 120 gbs. I am guessing I probably do not need that level of quality, although I am considering just buying a hd just for the tapes that are family movies and exporting as uncompressed avi. Maybe I am just wasting money and uncompressed is not going to make a difference? So I guess mp4 with H.264 is the best codec for my situation. I am going to give it a try tonight and see what happens. Thanks.

[Scott David]

I just want to clarify. After I import the mini dv tape and I am ready to export, I want to make sure I am creating a replica copy of the mini dv tape for archiving purposes without any loss of quality(later in life maybe edit or just having an original version of the tape). Could I just keep the default settings or check “Match Sequence Settings” and that will create an identical digital copy of the mini dv tape?

For viewing on my media devices I think Greg’s directions are great.

[Scott David]

I exported the video as Quicktime movie with
-Codecs: H.264, AAC, Timecode
-Color profile: SD (6-1-6)
-Dimensions: 720 x 480.

The quality is pretty good except at points where there are rapid movements then the picture appears to be a little pixelated. Maybe I should use some sort of different setting?

[Chris Tompkins]

Why not just archive the captured clips?

Chris

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Scott,

If you want “backups” of your miniDV tapes, the best way is to simply connect TWO miniDV cameras with a 1394 cable. This will make an exact copy of the original footage, with zero quality loss. Ebay for cheap?

As another poster mentioned, your captured clips on the hard drive are still the SAME quality as what came from the tape, so rather than re-encode to another format that will result in some loss, just SAVE those captured clips! Those are a “backup” of the tape, same quality. Capture using “scene detect” so that you can easily delete “junk” clips and just keep the good scenes.

Of course, hard drives can and will fail, so tape seems a better long-term solution, although they require a functioning camera for playback. Lacking a second camera, put your raw clips on the timeline and “Export to Tape” to make a good tape backup to your DV camera.

Funny, I can still “play” the 60-year-old 8mm films inherited from my grandparents (using the vintage Kodak Brownie projector), but can’t play the 8mm videos of my own kids from 15 years ago, for lack of a functioning 8mm camcorder. I saw a post yesterday from a guy that was researching the best format to save his digital stills for long term, and his final conclusion was to make prints of them! They can last a 100+ years and don’t need a player or codec or anything. Anyhow…

Forget about “uncompressed” video, that is not a realistic option. Your footage was compressed to start with, so there is no advantage to saving an uncompressed copy. If you were leaning that way, there are free “visually lossless” codecs such as Lagarith or UT, but they will take up more drive space than the originals (but a lot less than uncompressed). And they won’t LOOK any better than the original, so we are back to just saving the DV .avi clips.

H.264 can look excellent with the right settings and makes small files for archiving, but – it is not the best choice for EDITING. Great delivery format, but not so great for editing. First, already very highly compressed, second is it takes more processing power to edit that codec, versus .avi for instance. So if you want to keep a copy that might later be re-edited, that would be the .avi that you captured the first time.

So we keep coming back to just keeping the captured DV .avi files (or I guess they are .mov on a Mac?). As for viewing, go nuts with the H.264, that’s what it’s for – delivery. I would not use the QuickTime wrapper, just go straight H.264 which gives you the MP4 files. Google “QuickTime Gamma Shift” and you will see why to avoid .mov files.

Hope this helps and doesn’t add to the confusion. For what it’s worth, I’ve been in video professionally for 21 years, early adopter of miniDV and NLE editing in the 90s, and have NEVER used uncompressed video, ever, if that says anything.

Best,

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jonny Webb]

Lots of good comments above, but as i often deal with mini-dv tapes, here’s a tip or two…

I use a Windows 7 pc to import the video from tape. Microsoft have a free program that’ll take your video from tape straight to avi files with no extra loss. Now its called Photo Gallery (go figure!) and comes in their Windows Essentials package (no need for the other bits).
I like this as i plug in the camera, answer where to save, and an hour or so later i have a folder with numerous avi files. (yes the files are split by timecode). easy. reliable.

I also use a free prog called DVdate. Many of the tapes are DV type 1 (audio interlaced with video). Many editing progs have proble with this inefficient encoding. So use DVdate to convert all files to DV Type 2 (still a single file but audio is a seperated stream). Less taxing on your computer. less room for trouble. Plus converting to type 2 has actually helped save some corrupted imports…

hope this helps.

[Rod Carr]

what would be your best solution suggestion using a Mac?

vidit

[Michal Tóth]

As Tero above mentioned correctly – capture over FireWire should be DV-PAL (or NTSC) this means DV25 (25Mbps). On HDisk it takes approx. 13GB per hour. I have a good experience with Movie Maker implemented in WindowsXP (Win7 MovieMaker is different and not suitable). You can capture to AVI container (DV25), then edit and send (record) back to tape over FireWire without any quality lose. This is the best way to have backup or archive. Next step is to keep it for future because playback DV25 on consumer equipment should not be so easy. Any conversion to DVD (MPEG2) would be quality degradation. H264 is a good choice.