[MacDV] Re: Digital Video Quality

[Mark M. Florida]

On 5/27/04 3:51 PM, Charles Pearson at pearson at tidewaterbaptist.org wrote:

> If I send the movie right to iDVD from iMovie,
> will I get the best image possible?

Yes.  That is, if this question is really asking "Should I use iDVD instead
of Toast?"  Toast's DVD encoding was added as more of a convenience to the
user than an actual useable tool (in my opinion) -- I've had all kinds of
"pops" and "glitches" with DVDs created with Toast 6, but never with iDVD.

> Does DVD-R media matter?

Possibly.  It won't make the image any better, but if your DVD player has
problems reading the disc, it could skip or glitch or be REALLY blocky.  At
least that's been my experience -- I was having playback problems, then I
burned my DVD on a different brand of media and the problems disappeared.

> Do I need to keep a copy of the original on DV Tape for future use (as in
further edit sessions, I do not want or have the room to keep my projects on my
> drive)? 

As most people on this list would recommend -- lay your edited piece to tape
as well as DVD.  That way if you need to re-import some of the edited stuff,
you have it basically at original quality (since importing DV via FireWire
in itself causes no image degradation at all -- just moving the 1s and 0s).

> Was kinda hoping the the DVD would become the new archive as
> well, but I guess poor image quality and the fact that I do not know
> how to record my DVDs back to my computer makes that a no-go.

Use the DVDs for playback -- and for copying to give to friends and family.
Almost everyone has a DVD player now (and most play DVD-R discs without
problems), but not everyone has a miniDV camcorder.  If you use iDVD for the
DVD creation, the quality should be quite good, but if you had to re-import
it for some reason, you'd lose a "generation" in the process of re-encoding
the video to DV.

> Oh, my poor little head is just so full of questions <smile>.

We're all here to help each other.

- Mark