Quality of video from HDD camera

[zehavi]

Hello,
Could you please let me konw if DVD movie captured from HDD camcorder is with lower quality than the DVD movie captured from
mini-DV camcorder?
Thanks,
Abraham

[SoldOnParadise]

I just bought my first camcorder. I did a lot of research and came to the conclusion that MiniDV offers the best video quality and is the most friendly when it comes to editing. I have no experience with HDD but I have been extremely pleased with my MiniDV. Since MiniDV appears to be reaching the end of it's life cycle there are a lot of great deals out there! Good luck with your decision.

Aloha

[Ron P.]

Based on all that information? No, sorry I can not. There are too many variables that can affect this.

• What make/model of HDD camcorder? Consumer or Professional?
• What make/model of mini-dv camcorder? Consumer or Professional?

Professional grade camcorders or cameras will have better lens, 3-CCD chip, better internal operating components, as opposed to the Consumer grade.

• What format does the HDD camcorder record to?
• Mini-dv records to tape, using DV (digital video), often misconstrued as the wrapper it is contained in, AVI.

MPEG is a compressed format, however it is a higher quality, and based on the number of regenerations (recoding) can still give you a high quality video. The standard DVD uses MPEG2 compression. In order to place a video using the DV compression codec, it must be encoded to MPEG2.

If the HDD camcorder uses, say MPEG4, then it has be decompressed, then recompressed to MPEG2, so that it can be burned onto a DVD, which equals a possible loss in quality...

[richlux]

While it's true that the quality of the camcorder will make a difference, MiniDV inherently has better video quality than HDD because MiniDV uses the DV Codec, which compresses only within frames while HDD uses MPEG compression which compresses between and within the frames. So basically, DV stores every video frame, but MPEG-2 does not. Here's a better description of MPEG-2 compression:

"...a series of adjacent frames are compared, and only the information necessary to describe the differences between successive frames is retained. When the encoded material is played back, a decoder extrapolates from the stored information to re-create a complete set of discrete frames."

The full article is here: http://dvdmadeeasy.com/subscriber/artic ... age_2.html

The better the camcorder, the better the individual frames will look, but it will not change the fact that more of the source video will be compressed (e.g. lost) with an HDD camcorder.

That said, if you are producing DVDs from your video, the resulting file will get encoded into MPEG-2 format anyway, so you're back to square one. In which case the quality depends on which MPEG-2 encoder is better... the one in the camcorder or the one in VideoStudio This assumes, of course, that you use a program like VideoStudio that does "smart rendering". Otherwise your MPEG-2 video from your HDD camcorder will get encoded a second time when you create a DVD thus reducing the video quality even further.

Rich

[zehavi]

Thank you very much for your helpful replies.
Abraham