[MacDV] VCR to DVD Strategy

[Francis Fitzpatrick]

About compression: Yes the less you compress the better the quality, so 
yes, put a half hour on a full DVD in mpeg2 format.
For the best results, just back up your one hundred GB of iMovie 
quicktime files to DVDs - but that's more than you want to do, and I'm 
sure you've thought of that yourself.
Frank Fitzpatrick,

On Apr 11, 2006, at 9:00 PM, Aaron wrote:

>> From: Dennis Fazio <dfz at mac.com>
>> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 11:32:14 -0500
>>
>> I am in the process of converting about a dozen home video VCR tapes
>> to DVD. I have a Canopus ADVC-100 I got a while ago and it works just
>> great feeding into iMovie on my PowerBook.
>>
>> I could use some advice on how to best manage the quantity. I have
>> about 100GB of firewire disk available which will hold 3 or 4 2-hour
>> tapes at about 24-25GB apiece. I was thinking I would just do a
>> direct copy/convert one tape at a time to DVD, but then I thought I
>> might want to edit them down a bit later on before a final version.
>> That would require writing to DVD to free up space and later ripping
>> them back in to edit.
>
> Do you mean that you want to ultimately archive them as standard 
> (playable) DVD's, or to DVD discs as a storage medium? I'm presuming 
> the former.
>
>> My concern is the loss of quality from the extra compression step.
>> Since the original is 200 or so line resolution from a VCR camera, is
>> there a way to do a temporary write, re-rip, edit and rewrite process
>> without really losing any quality that I or others without expert
>> eyes would really notice from this kind of source material? If I
>> wrote, say, 1/2 hour or 1 hour of material per DVD to reduce
>> compression, would that help?
>
> If you save them for now as standard DVD's or just as MPEG-2 files on 
> DVD discs, and if you use a compression rate that will allow what 
> you'll want on a single DVD later to fit on one, you can edit later 
> with a program like MPEG Streamclip without having to go through an 
> extra compression step. That's assuming that the editing you'll want 
> to do will just be cutting and pasting. After editing, you'll have to 
> re-create a playable DVD using either a free program like Sizzle or 
> some other program that lets you create a DVD directly from an MPEG-2 
> file. (I'm not familiar enough with either iDVD or DVD Studio Pro to 
> know if you can do that with them. Maybe somebody else will tell us!)
>
>  - Aaron
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