Quality of copy

bossa · Post by **bossa** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:34 am

Hi All
New here and new to backing up videos.
I'm trying to backup the family home movies to DVD.They are all on MiniDV from a Canon MV 530i (PAL). I have trialed a number of programs Roxio and Power director and I concerned about he quality of the copy on the finished DVD.
I have turned to Ulead as I have a lot of good reports.My question is can one get near original quality or is that asking too much?
I also read some one suggesting never to reuse your Mini DV Tapes.
Any advice will be much apreciated .
Thanks
Steve

TDK1044 · Post by **TDK1044** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:43 pm

Mini DV tapes can be used multiple times with no loss of quality. I've reused some of mine 3 or 4 times with no problems. As for your other question; your end DVD will be end up on the DVD MPEG2 format but the quality loss should be so minimal as to not be an issue. I've done experiments checking my original mini DV pictures against an edited version of the same pictures through Video Studio and the quality loss is so small as to not concern me.

bossa · Post by **bossa** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:05 pm

Hi Terry
Thanks for your advice .Will be transfering some movies over to DVD in the next few days .Hopefully I wont have to come and bug you guys
Cheers Steve

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:26 pm

Hi Steve, and welcome to the forums.

I'm sure you will be back to bug us because getting your MiniDV tapes to DVD in a good quality is not as straight forward as it may seem. There are a lot of aspects to keep an eye on and understand the implications.

You can achieve a quality just as good as the original tape but you have to make sure all project properties are set correctly.

Don't be afraid to come back here asking for advice. You would only be bugging us if you came back here, asking for advice, ignoring the advice given, complaining about the results and asking for more advice.

Have a read of this post and make sure you give all the pertinent details if you need advice.
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=8959
If you do your part, help is going to be swift and to the point.

To get you starting, have a look at this also http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=27

Good luck and enjoy.

bossa · Post by **bossa** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:46 pm

Hey Heinz
Nice one! thanks for your welcome and advice

Nice to be here .There are obviously a lot of experienced users that I can rely on for help .
Cheers
Steve

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 2:17 am

The most important factor is MPEG bitrate. MPEG is lossy compression which means data is thrown away during compression. A higher bitrate means that more data is being used for each second of video, so less data is thrown-away.

I try to use a bitrate of at least 6000 kbps when possible. This allows about 90 minutes on a single-layer DVD if you use Dolby audio. (Commercial DVDs often have a bitrate in the ballpark of 6000.)

The DVD standard does not set a fixed level of compression -

Higher bitrate = higher quality = bigger file size = lower compression = less playing time.

Lower bitrate = lower quality = smaller file size = higher compression = more playing time.

The DVD spec allows bitrates up to about 9800 kbps, audio & video combined, but some DVD players have trouble with "burned" DVDs that contain video above about 8000 kbps.