DV vs MPEG-2 Capturing in Pinnacle Studio??
 

Hi,
I am a Pinnacle Studio Plus Mediasuite 10.6 user. In the settings category in the Capture window there is an option for capturing in either DV or MPEG-2 modes.
In the DV mode setting it states "best output to dv tape."
In the MPEG-2 setting it states "best output to disc."
My question is;
Has anyone compared both for quality, etc. I tried both with just a couple short clips and couldn't see any differences.
Your input would be most appreciated. Thanks, Ray

Output quality depends on what your output sample rates are set to when you are encoding.

But in the case that you are talking about, I believe the reason it is stating DV for output from tape is because that is what it is. Uncompressed DV output from the source. In the case of capturing from disk, it is set to mpeg2 because that is the file format on the disk. Mpeg2 is a compressed file format because it is impractical to fit an uncompressed high-quality DV format to an optical disk. There just isn't enough space.

Hope that helps.

capture standard DV, not mpeg2, even if you are going to a DVD in the end. DV will survive many generations of rendering and color tweaks and such. It will also cut faster (many times!) on your computer b/c your CPU will not have to decode the mpeg2 stream, which is processor intensive.

Hi Jason,
I believe you misunderstood my original question.
In the DV mode setting it states best output "to" dv tape."
Not DV output "from" the source. In other words, use this setting if you are going to transfer your final project "to" dv tape instead of dvd. Basicly, it's asking what you want to do with your final project.

Ray:

Your question is not being misunderstood. You are being advised it is best to capture all your footage and edit it in DV, no matter what your intended target it.

The reason for this is a that DV handle editing with much more ease, and will give you better output than trying to edit in .mpg. Mpg editing has become easier, but it is subject to loss of image information much more easily that DV. That is because DV has full information for each frame of video, whereas mpg uses information in a group of pictures (GOP) to intepolate a particular frame's information. Its very processor intensive, and the interpolation can occasionally result in unintended results.

If you are only capturing to burn off to a disk, that may work out alright.

I have used Pinnacle Studio for years, but still edit in DV.

I have not seen a comparison, but remember that the new Studio is built on the Liquid engine. It natively edits MPEG including long-GOP. Because of that, it may be less likely to lose quality editing MPEG and no need to transcode on export. DV still might be better. Just not sure.