Transfer Mini DV to DVD
 

Hopefully someone can help me out,

If you transfer Mini DV to a DVD do you lose quality? I have been told that I would lose none

And as a secondary question, How much quality would i lose transferirng Digibeta to DVD!

Thanks

You're always going to lose some quality going from DV or Digibeta to DVD. DVD has a maximum bitrate of 9mbps using MPEG2 compression. How much quality you lose depends on how much video you're trying to squeeze onto a DVD.

Both DV and DVD are sampled 8 bits at 4:2:0 while Digibeta is 10 bit at 4:2:2 - that's what makes Digibeta a professional format (theoretically lossless), while DV and DVD are considered consumer formats. Tech talk aside, you may or may not loose VISUAL quality. Just compare a high quality (say Hollywood made) DVD to your DV footage and you will understand what I mean. If you can put your hands on a high quality mpeg2 encoder (hardware or software), you might get the same (or very close) visual quality on a DVD.

BUT you will SURELY LOOSE something very important, and that's the option to further edit that footage. While both DV and Digibeta are acquisition formats, DVD is a delivery format not suitable for further editing.

Other than the more specific info from the other posters, in a basic answer to your question, you DO lose quality going from MiniDV to DVD.

Granted, the codec specifics for each one is quite different, so what is sacrificed cannot easily be quantified specifically as resolution or 'latitude', but taken only from a data file size context, (and using the most standardized or default settings on run-of-the-mill mpeg2 encoding applications, you can estimate that a DVD video is going to be roughly 1/5th the data file size of a standard definition MiniDV file.

A wide variation of user customizable settings in the encoding app can have a great deal to do with how accurately the end result represents the source material, but either way, mpeg2 encoding does indeed introduce a significant amount of compression to the MiniDV file.

Whoever gave you the earlier information about having no loss in quality in transferring to a DVD very likely didn't know what they were talking about.


-Jon