Editing from DVD

[Jan E. Schotsman]

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Message text written by Thubten Kunga

"Yes, I know that. I was referring to is what is on the tape, which as 
you so rightly point out, is already very compressed. But do we ever 
have the 65 GB/hr in a form we can save like that Erica? Isn't that 
just theoretical while we are looking at it? Is there a way to save DV 
to the uncompressed format? And if so what is that format called and 
how do we do that?
"

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I wouldn't call DV 'very compressed', unless you mean the factor of about 5
in size reduction. It's lightly compressed compared to MPEG2.
In QuickTime Player Pro you can save to the 'Apple Component' format. Of
course the resulting movie will not look any better than the original. You
would have to use a camera that can record uncompressed or scan a high
quality film to see the difference between totally uncompressed and DV.

BTW, there is a number of subtle differences between the Apple Component
format and DV.
DV has gamma 2.2 and Apple Component uses the standard Mac gamma of 1.8.
Without correction at playback time DV would display too light on a Mac.
Also DV uses so-called "video range" coding. Simply put, in DV black is at
value 19 and white at 235 whereas in Apple Component black is at 0 and
white at 255.
And Apple's uncompressed format is really more suitable for PAL because it
can accomodate more color (chroma) information than NTSC uses.
QuickTime still is very RGB-centric even though much of the world uses
video encoding these days.

Jan.