[MacDV] Mini-dvd camcorders

[Gordon Alley]

Agreeing with previous replies, going into a little more detail...

As long as you don't ever edit the video, a DVD camcorder is probably fine.
The rub comes if you do decide to edit the video recorded on the DVD.

The DVD camcorder uses fairly heavy compression when it records the video on
its DVD media. To edit that video, you have to rip it from the DVD,
converting it to DV (which has much less compression). Then after editing,
you would use iDVD or similar to record the edited video back to DVD, which
entails another cycle of heavy compression.

Each compression cycle effectively throws away some of the video information
(the more compression, the more loss of video information). In the above
scenario, you've passed the original video through a fairly lossy
compression cycle TWICE. The final result will probably be disappointing.

--Gordon

On 12/16/05, Alex <alex at fotomotion.net> wrote:
>
> I agree with Nick on this one
> Only useful if you do not have a Mac with iLife.
> The final menu look is ugly as sin when you use the disk,
> Plus you are recording to Mpg2 which is inferior in quality on your
> primary recording medium!
>
> This is not for any sort of serious work but more of a consumer toy.
>
> Alex
>
> On 16 Dec 2005, at 20:53, Nick Scalise wrote:
>
> > From: David Minard <dminard at rcn.com>
> >
> > Any thoughts out there on mini-dvd-r, etc. camcorders? Is this a "not
> > yet" technology?
>
> My thoughts are that DVD camcorders are not DV. With DVD Camcorders,
> editing is much crippled in that you first have to rip the DVD to
> your hard
> drive, then you have to convert it to DV, then you can import it to
> your app
> for editing. This is MPEG 2 compressed video remember,
>
> Not worth getting.
>
> Not now, probably not ever.
>
> My 2 cents worth.
>

--
Gordon B. Alley
http://galley.home.texas.net
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