Mini DV Capture Options

[Aperture_Star]

Hello All,

I am fairly new to video editing and have some questions about Capturing Mini DV footage.

I have some mini dv tapes that seem to have been shot in: 4:3 720x480,DVD, Variable BitRate

I am currently in the capture video section of VideoStudio and wanted to know what is the highest quality capture format for these tapes.

From the video studio drop down it says that i can capture in the following:

DVD
DV
Mpeg
VCD
SVCD

Also under options> Video options
It has a bunch of Video profiles, should i change any of those?

My final output will be onto Standard DVDs

So my questions are:
1- What is the best above format to capture in?
2- Should i change the video options profile?
3- Ideally I would love to have the video shown/edited in 16:9 is that possible considering it was shot inf 4:3? If 16:9 is possible should i capture it differently to achieve 16:9?

Thanks for all your help

[Aperture_Star]

** Correction: The source is not "4:3 720x480,DVD, Variable BitRate"
That was just what showed up when i selected the DVD capture format. When i change capture method for example to DV it changes to 720x480,DVD,Type-1,NTSC.

Thanks in advance for anyone that can help.

[Ken Berry]

In fact, that should read 720 x 480, DV (not DVD) Type 1, NTSC.

And that is what you should be capturing in. And you don't have to set any capture properties as DV is captured always with one set one properties. It is also the easiest and best quality format to edit and later convert to DVD-compliant mpeg-2.

You must capture DV via Firewire, so I assume you have a Firewire port on your computer and a Firewire cable to capture with. If not, a Firewire card is cheap and usually comes with a cable -- make sure it is a 6 pin big jack at one end and a 4 pin smaller one at the other end (for the camcorder).

Otherwise you can capture direct to 'DVD' format which is mpeg-2, which is fine if you intend to produce a DVD, though you need to remember if you do multiple conversions/encodings in that format, you will lose quality, whereas you don't with DV.

As for editing in 16:9, if your original video is 4: 3, there is not too much you can do. Setting 16:9 will merely distort the original. Otherwise, you would need to crop to get rid of the black lines to either side, but that is a tedious process...

[Kingston]

For standard definition video shot on mini-dv tape, you want DV. If you are going to capture the whole tape to one big file, then change the option from type 1 to type 2. I always use type 2 so I don't have to worry about capturing an incomplete scene no matter what it's length.

If you use one of the other options such as MPEG, then you are not only capturing, you are compressing the video to a different format.

[Aperture_Star]

Thanks a lot for your responses.

[lata]

Hi Kingston

There seems to be some confusion regarding DV-Type 1 and Type 2

There is no size limit when capturing DV-Type 1 as opposed to DV-Type 2

Type 1 and 2 have different numbers of audio streams, the video is the same.
You can capture a full DV tape, generally 60 minutes to one file using "Type-1"
This of course will be 13 Gb

I have always captured using Type-1, having said that I generally use Split by Scene.

The only limit to file size would be if your file system uses Fat32 which is limited to 4 Gb.

Properties of large Dv-Avi

AVI 11gb.jpg (97.54 KiB) Viewed 4787 times

[Kingston]

I've been capturing to one 13GB file with Type 2 (??).

[canuck]

I've been capturing to one 13GB file with Type 2 (??).

So have I, DV Type 2 has nothing to do with file size.

[Kingston]

All this time I've had it in my mind that there was a file size limitation with Type 1, but I just proved myself wrong when I captured Type-1 to a 6 GB file.

[skier-hughes]

http://www.myvideoproblems.com/Tutorial ... iFiles.htm