Losing Quality when Capturing
 

Hi. I've been a using the XH-A1 for about a year now and I'm satisfied with what I has as far as picture quality goes. However, out of no where, I'm told that I am not capturing my footage right and that I'm losing quality when I capture directly into Premiere.

So, I've been doing my lurking for quite a while around here and I've been reading up on Canopus, Blackmagic, and Cineform products. Unfortunately, I don't really understand what their products offer me and how/if they can help my footage avoid losing quality.

Thoughts?

Farid... If I understand what you're saying correctly, there are two components to your question. First, capture quality. The video on the tape in your A1 is in HDV format. To the best of my understanding, capturing to Premier using the appropriate preset (which is likely HDV PAL 50i for your locale) will retain the format of the source video on the tape. Think of it like you're copying a file on your computer from one disk to another. There should be no "generational losses" in the capture process.

Second, Cineform is an intermediate (lossless?) codec that will make your footage easier to work with inside Premier. I also believe (although I don't know as fact) that Cineform footage will not suffer degradation due to re-compression when you apply color correction and other effects to your clips. If you're working in the native HDV format, this is where you could be losing video quality.

I cannot speak to Canopus or Blackmagic since I have no personal experience with them.

Please note that if you're on Windows Vista, I would stay away from Cineform for now. I installed their trial and was rewarded with two weeks of system flakiness and crashes and ended up having to reload the OS and all applications. I hope that they get it working because I really want to try it again.