JVC MiniDVm2t-PC-MiniDVm2t-ComponentOut
 

Anybody with the HD1/HD10 or PD1 gone from Mini DV in the cam to PC via firewire, edited, then gone via firewire BACK to Mini DV in the cam and then outputted that from cam in analog via the Component (Y/Pb/Pr)...

If so, what's the analog result like after it's been outputted. How does it hold up?

Thanks.

I don't think we can do hd to mini-dv via firewire. That's an FX1 thing. Is that what you're talking about?

heath

Those three JVC cams can send the Mpeg 2 Transport Stream from Mini DV to PC for editing and back to Mini DV again. That is not in question..

What I'm wondering is whether anyone has - subsequent to doing the above - next outputted the edited footage from Mini DV via the component output in analog.

Graham, I'm sure lots of people with JVCs are doing this. Unless they have a DVHS deck or are making WMV-HD disks, it's the easy way for us to view our edited footage in HD.

How does it hold up? Well the transfer itself is just bits flowing, so has no effect on anything. So the answer will depend on how the editing is being done - i.e. native mpeg editing or via an intermediate codec like Cineform's CFHD - and how many re-renders, and on how fussy you are.

The Cineform website has a whitepaper on multigenerational loss after up to nine re-renders - that might help you.

Also, I recall someone saying the quality of their JVC's component cable wasn't great, and they had purchased a better one. Mine is fine, but something to keep in mind I suppose.

That's really helpful Graham, thanks.

I myself have experienced no discernible image degradation sending the MPEG 2 cam-pc-cam. I'm using the KDDI software which is a native MPEG2 editor, if not much else! Tommorow I'll find out about the component part of the journey as I'm bringing a PD1 and a 60 sec test on MiniDV into a commercials house.

Just to be clear, the cam-pc-cam transfers are completely lossless - just raw bits moving with no de/recompression involved. So if you moved some footage to a .mt2 file on the PC, did nothing except view it, and then moved it back to the cam then the resulting footage would be unchanged.

If you edit the footage while it's on the PC - e.g. color correction - then it gets recompressed and will be (slightly) altered from the original.

And one thing I'm not clear about myself is the situation with simple cut editing. The group of pictures around the cut will obviously have to get re-compressed, but it may be that not all editing apps are smart enough to know not to recompress the remainder of the clip as well.

I've cut this 60 sec test with the KDDI software and still can't see any loss.

A review of the KDDI software says:

'MPEG Edit Studio Pro LE is a “native” MPEG-2, Transport Stream editor. Unless an effect is applied, MPEG-2 data is not decompressed. Just like with native DV editing, source material without effects is written directly to a movie file during export. (If necessary, at cut points, a few replacement frames are computed and output.)'

Indeed, because it's such a basic package it has no color correction or effects! Fortunately this suits the project and, as an editor, I very rarely dissolve. On my first low budget feature I did one dissolve. The only manipulation I really anticipate is straight cuts.

Anyway, I guess today I will find out when I see the analog result.

Will post again afterwards.

We patched it into a 16:9 progressive screen and the image was astounding - no noise, no image degradation. This was my first time seeing it on a proper progressive monitor and I was surprised how good the footage was.

However, they're going to try to work with m2t files, so analog isn't neccessary. It's good to know that if they can't do so, we'll still have the analog...

Something else that came out of the conversation was the difficulty of working with progressive in an SD context.

It was mentionned that if we want to keep it progressive, we may have to up-res to HD and work in HD even though it's SD.