[MacDV] Re: Importing From DVD

[Mark M. Florida]

Handbrake is super easy to use, but there are some MAJOR disadvantages:

1.  It only converts to MPEG-4, which is a fairly "lossy" codec.  It 
looks pretty good at higher bitrates, but it's still lossy.

2.  You'll still have to convert it AGAIN to DV to re-edit (yet another 
recompression "generation").

3.  Something weird happens with the gamma when converting to MPEG-4 
with Handbrake -- the picture gets really dark.  Hardly ideal when 
trying to preserve as much quality as possible.

So...  I'd recommend against it.

In fact, I'd recommend *against* using any software tools (way too 
tedious and time-consuming), but rather just re-capture it from a DVD 
player back into your computer via DV.  Going to analog and back to 
digital kind of "smooths out" the image, so the MPEG-2 artifacts won't 
be as noticeable.  (at least this has been my experience).

FWIW.

- Mark

On Jun 5, 2004, at 3:58 PM, thomas fritscher wrote:

> You need to convert it back into another format. "Handbrake" (find it 
> on
> Versiontracker) does that pretty quickly. It'll convert it into an mpg
> movie which IMovie might be able to use (if not, you'll have to export
> it as DV .mov from QT Player)
> I hope this helps,
> thomas