It's hard to say about the misuse of digitize. It's use in video production dates back to early Avid days, when digitize meant to get the footage on to your drives. Of course, most the footage went through an A to D conversion and was digitized. From a purely electronic stand point almost any encoding, decoding and transcoding of different formats involves the material being changed from analog to digital. It was confusing your wanting to transcode from one format to another and not wanting to digitize.

I was confused by wanting output, but not wanting to digitize.

Boyd, I am with you when you question the availability of component outputs on DV equipments. Of course this is pure market protection from Sony and others. "Components is what you need for best image quality" That's what we read and hear everyday in the DVD world, and indeed cheap DVD'd have component outputs...But DVD's are not supposed to be fed into the (overpriced) broadcast chain... So there is no risk that a simular equip as Sony's DSR45 is going to be replaced by a 10 times cheaper DV vcr. B.T.W DAC-2 is a good alternative (not made by Sony!!). For some waveforms see www.videoguys.com/dac2_advc100.pdf

Digitize means to convert something to a digital form.

Started way back before Avid IIRC.

Other solutions...
 

Boyd,

there are quite often second hand Pinnacle Reeltime cards going cheap on Ebay. These will convert 1394 to component analogue on the fly, and also capture analogue and 1394 etc etc.

I got one for £200 recently, and use it for high quality component capture for greenscreen.

Regards,

Julian