I read somewheres that alot of people convert their video to betacam and that when you capture video to your computer it really isnt uncompressed and it loses quaility. I was just wondering if anyone knows of any software out there or anyway that I can covert my video to betacam or make the video truely uncompressed so that I wont lose any quaility. Thanks

it's compressed as soon as it gets recorded to dv tape. if you capture with firewire, you get the same compressed data that is on the tape. to go to betacam you need a betacam deck. you probably can't afford one. as recording media, betacam and dv are nearly identical. betacam cameras tend to be better quality cameras with better quality lenses than most dv cameras, but you would get no benefit copying dv tape to betacam (except maybe for archiving.) now digi beta is a different story, but you definitely can't afford that.

some people do capture their dv tape and then convert the footage to a less compressed format. this probably makes the most sense if you're going to be doing a lot of effects work or color correction. but you'll end up with much bigger files.

We transfer our DV to BetaSP at a friends studio since most if not all TV stations still use this format for broadcast.

My friend had his movie transferred from DVCAM to DigiBeta and sent off to FilmLook to have it processed and put back on DigiBeta so that there would be very little loss in quality.