DV Firewire question....

[bertie]

Hi People,

I just bought a Sony digital mini camera and i have one question: :)

What is the difference between capturing from DV Firewire and analog capture card?

Is there just the speed or the quality as well?

I tried capturing from my analog capture card (TerraTV) but the quality is very bad, im saying very bad because when i connected the camera strait into my TV the quality was very very good. What do you think, can i get the same quality when capturing from DV Firewire card?

Help please :)

Bertie,

[Pedro Itriago]

The difference between DV firewire transfer from a camera/dv player & analog video capture is exactly as the difference between digital audio transfer & analog to digital audio conversion.

While the first ones are just binary transfers where the most prominent thing that can go wrong is timing problems (jitter) & connection loss, the other ones have many factors to consider, one of them being your most likely culprit, poor capture settings.

If you mess both in video and/or audio AD capture in...say capture resulotion in video and/or sample rate in audio, you get a very lousy capture.

Firewire capture is mostly plug'n play. Be mindful of the dv resolution you have made the audio in the video cassette. The best one is with 16 bit audio, which will give you 48khz. If you had it on 12 bit, it will only go so far as 32khz.

Also that the caturing software (you're capturing with saw, right? ;) ) has the proper video resolutions set in. You'll want to capture video full frame @ 720 * 480 if in NTSC or 720*576 in PAL (HD video is another beast), this would be the highest quality. If all you want is a reference video to synch audio with, you could take one video field instead of both & smaller resolution.

Also, with firewire you already have dv encoding already made by your camera, no much cpu involved in the video compression. With analog video you get to choose which codec (dv, plain avi, mjpeg, mpeg 1 2 or 4, quicktime, etc.) you'll use as well as compression ratio, both of which can greatly reduce the capture quality & file length (side note, when I use analog capture, I always tend to capture with the lowest compression, but most of the time I wrongly calculate how much disc space I need & ran out of it) and depending on your capturing hardware, you are limited in the kind of codec you can use and/or if the coding is not made by the capturing hardware but on the cpu instead, which will give you a great cpu performance hit depending on your system.

I'm also counting that you know that, as well as in audio, going DA & then to AD will degrade your source material; how much is degraded depends on the quality of what's between AD & DA

If your souce is DV, your best bet is firewire.

[bertie]

I'm very appreciated ;)

Thanks for your time, :)

Later,

Bertie,

P.S. I'll deffenetly go with FireWire.