dv codecs compared
 

Thanks very much for posting this comparison. Not much difference between the various DV codecs--they all seem to distort chroma by roughly the same amount. I wonder if a more quantitative comparison can be made of a few different fidelity quality indicators.

Rob,

What do you mean. If you have something in mind send me an e-mail. I did the test as per a thread on canopus forum.

What I meant was, taking a look at the codecs effects and comparing them qualitatively is all very nice, but there's no way of definitively ranking the codecs' fidelities, or selecting a "best" codec, or even different "best" codecs depending on which metric is most valued for one's particular application.

If the codecs could be parameterized and each parameter reduced to a numerical quality indicator, it would be helpful in determining which DV codec should be preferred.

It's sort of like that old 1891 Lord Kelvin quotation that gets hammered into every freshman physics student: "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science."

hmm, let me put it in less scientific terms

'the proof is in the pudding'

clearly by looking at the images one can make there own conclusions, the test was not set up to tell you, which you should use, or which one is the best, there are enough sites that do this, we simply wanted (for ourselves) to see what is out there. We decided to share it with you...

Our conclusions mean nothing but here they are; using the dc card is your best bet, it has a smaller foot print because it's mpg and has the best quality...but that aside you have two schools of thought codecs with softners, and codecs with a lot of softners...softners work for the first few gens after that it's downhill, we like the result of both so we use avid and canopus as our primary editors...but for you it might be a diff story...