I am posting this question here instead of the 'long black line' because it has less to do with tape and more to do with 'in camera processing'.

This may be a stupid question, but I have a collection of older projects done in iMovie that I want to back up and save in the uncompressed dv signal that iMovie worked on them as. Some of the projects are to large too save to a single layer data dvd in the uncompressed dv file format - so I am planning on saving the finished projects back to dv tape so I can clean them off my burdened hard drive.

I have two mini-dv cameras with which I can export the projects back to tape: The Canon XL2, and a lower end consumer Canon Elura. Obviously for the sake of convenience and desk space I would like to just plug in the Elura and save through it - I know the XL2 is a far better camera for imaging, processing, etc - but what about straight archiving back to tape? -
For the cleanest archive will there be any difference between the cameras?
-Jon

For the cleanest archive will there be any difference between the cameras?
no. It's digital, and the cameras will more or less copy the 1s and 0s perfectly (with error correction to catch any errors).


Technically DV is compressed... the compression occurs when the image is laid to tape. When you transfer firewire, your computer copies the video data exactly so there's no loss there. iMovie doesn't capture little extra stuff like timecode or user bits though. Anyways, firewire transfer is lossless. In your case, you can't do better than it.

I do this too. The only problem is that the audio track has to be downmixed to stereo.

I am posting this question here instead of the 'long black line' because it has less to do with tape and more to do with 'in camera processing'.Sorry Jonathan, but I had to move it anyway, because we're trying to keep all of our tape / deck / archive etc. discussions in one place. Thanks,

Thanks gang, thats the info I'm looking for.
-Jon