Quality of transcoding M2ts

[Michael Galvan]

Hello,

I have been capturing my HDV 24F from my Canon XL-H1 as raw .M2t and trhen transcodng to ProRes or PhotoJPEG for editing.

Now that I have Final Cut Pro 6, I may begin editing all my HDV shot material natively and just use the render to ProRes option (and do final output in ProRes or UC still).

I recently bought a Firestore FS-4HD and it works perfectly fine, capturing the 24F stream as an .M2t. My question is, will I go through a generational quality loss transcoding that .M2t into the HDV quicktime wrapper? Or is it better using the FS-C which would just capture the video directly into the Quicktime Wrapper, therefore bypassing having to transcode it?