recap DV through SDI

[Dylan Reeve]

My approach to this is slightly different as I’ve come at it from Avid generally. I’ve not used DV in FCP since 2002 or something (when it was actually pretty iffy I reckon).

If capturing from DV and laying back to DV it’s been my experience that staying DV/Firewire for ingest and output is the best. For straight cuts only, up to 8 generations that I’ve tested there was absolutely no degradation.

The problem with capturing baseband (especially analogue component) is that it risks making minor spatial shifts in the footage, which if going back to DV means that DCT blocks will no-longer align which causes massive degradation.

I have also compared video captured into Avid at 1:1 (uncompressed) both via SDI from DSR-1800 and Firewire. There was no visual difference and on a very very minor technical difference.

I am not as familiar with FCP’s inner workings, so would defer to Gary on that one, but in essence the video from the SDI source isn’t any better, it still has been through DV compression and suffers all the resulting issues, however depending on the software’s methodology for DV to Baseband conversion that aspect of the capture or conversion from DV to Uncompressed may be less than ideal.

I would expect, as an online editor, that if I had DV in a time and was rending to a higher quality format that my result renders would be as good as they could be. Any potential gains from a conversion to a higher quality earlier in the chain, I would assume, are going to offer very minimal, if any, improvement in overall results.

Perhaps in a case like this the best thing to do is test? Process only a small selection of shots and see if there is an appreciable difference that would make the extra effort worthwhile.