Can I fit 11mins of uncompressed video on ONE DVD?
 

Hey everyone,
I have 11minutes worth of footage that I want to transfer from 16mm to digital format for editing on my NLE (Premiere Pro). Now, I've always gone from 16mm to MiniDV in the past but I was wondering if I could get high quality, fully uncompressed video onto ONE DVD (not Mpeg2 as I understand that's compressed). Is 11minutes of uncompressed video still too much data for one DVD? I have a DUAL LAYER DVD player, so maybe I could fit it all onto the DVD if I get a Dual layer DVD disc?

My goal is to preserve the quality of the 16mm footage I have (WWII gun camera) for in-depth study and I understand that MiniDV is highly compressed and a big generation loss from a 16mm transfer. Since I don't have a Digital Beta deck or anything other than a MINIDV camera, I can't think of any other cheap options to go with unless I can fit the direct 16mm uncompressed video onto a DVD.

Any ideas out there?

simple question is how will you get the transfert from 16mm film to an uncompressed format ? what capture device ?

You can certainly have your film scanned at a high resolution with no compression, but I am not sure you would be willing to pay it. Ask your lab what 2K scan costs.

I do not understand the necessity of fitting the scan onto one DVD, when you will not be able to play it anywhere as is, but since you are interested, let us perform a quick calculation. 11 minutes of footage at 24 frames/second equals 15840 frames. Assuming you use the 10 bit/channel Cineon format, each 2K frame occupies 12,746,752 bytes. Multiply that by the number of frames and you get a total size of 192,555MB. That obviously does not fit onto one DVD. If instead you use a crummy 8 bit format (and I mean total, not per channel), you would divide that by four to get 48,138MB, which still does not fit onto one DVD. To make it even more attractive (relatively speaking hehe), if you had shot at 16fps rather than 24fps, you would need 32,092MB which, again, does not fit onto one DVD.

So there you have it...now where's that Blu Ray burner again? Maybe lossy compression serves a purpose after all!

Guys, good questions. It was my understanding that the telecine transfer could be done by capturing to a hard drive and then exporting to a DVD? Is that normally how it's done?

Edit: I just saw that Emre edited his post and included the above info. Okay, so I guess you answered my questions:) Now, is it really that bad going to MiniDV? The problem is is that I need to study this footage in absolute detail without breaking the bank. I will be studying how bullets ricochet on terrain and convergences and therefore need to be sure I can see this in the best detail possible (the 16mm footage is SPECTACULAR and I am getting the reel as a loan, but need my own copy).

Is MiniDV the only feasible option here?

-Nick

you do not answer to the question, so it mainly depends what you are using as digitizing system and what resolution it produces.
since you can scan a 16mm movie like a suite of pictures, you can imagine to have very high resolution pictures (like 4megapixel) in jpeg format.
each would be only few hundred kilobytes, so you can imagine to fit them all on a 8gig dual layer DVD.
This will be a lot better than a standard video at 720x640 even uncompressed
number of pictures taken per sec is also needed. a standard 16 or 24 fps will be a lot smaller than hi-speed 16mm at 60 or 120 fps.

so about 16000 frame about 1 mb each is 16 giga, then you will need 2 DVD dual layer.
question is why would you have it on DVD, since using such hi-res pictures will require to copy them on harddisk for proper viewing (whatever you choose, uncompressed video or jpeg pictures).

What about an external USB 2.0/Firewire drive?

The more I read about minidv and how it compares to digibeta, the more I think I'll just settle with minidv again for this project. However, does anyone know if there's a generation loss going from minidv to hard drive? Isn't it all still digital, not analog so that means no effect on quality? The only generation hit is going from 16mm to Minidv?

Correct, and it is a big loss, I'm afraid. 16mm is at least equal to 2K.

What will this "loss" effect down the line? Color correction? Chroma keying? etc?

16mm superior in every way. Even if you do no retouching, you may not find a DV transfer acceptable. It depends on your needs; you know what a well-produced DVD looks like.

How about HD? Can they do an HD or HDV transfer for you?

Sure they can, but I don't have the equipment to playback HD tapes.

By the way, this is something that I have always been curious about--if I get a transfer house to transfer footage onto an HD tape, can I play it back and retain the HD quality by using an HD camera as a playback deck? Could this be an option down the line for other projects?