DV or MPEG-2 capture?

Edin1 wrote on 10/25/2005, 4:18 AM

This issue keeps bugging me;
knowing that DV codec does 4:1:1 color subsampling, while MPEG-2 does 4:2:2 (or 4:2:0?), and knowing that my video will end up on DVD (MPEG-2, of course), I keep wondering whether capturing the video in DV or MPEG-2 format is better. I plan to do some light editing.
For DV capture, I would use my Sony VX2000 camcorder with pass-through, and for MPEG-2 capture, I would use the $100 VideOh! PCI AVC-2010 capture card by Adaptec.
Which one would be a better choice, even if the hardware for both was at the same level?

Comments

IanG wrote on 10/25/2005, 7:04 AM

Stick with DV for as long as you can! Working with MPEG2 typicaly gives inferior results, plus you can have problems with A/V synch & the NLE gets sluggish.

Ian G.

Chienworks wrote on 10/25/2005, 7:27 AM

MPEG is much more compressed than DV even though it starts out with more data. The image quality tends to be more degraded and doesn't hold up to re-encoding as well as DV does.

The other issue is that with DV each frame is a complete image. MPEG uses temporal compression in which most of the frames are hints of what has changed from previous frames so a whole group together must be accessed to draw each complete frame. This makes MPEG much slower and more cumbersome to edit on the timeline.

So, if that Adaptec card can capture MPEG at 25Mbps with all I frames then it would probably be better than DV. Otherwise don't bother.

shmulb wrote on 10/25/2005, 8:49 AM

Here is a link to some good info on that subject
http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/intro.htm#mpegvsavi

Edin1 wrote on 10/27/2005, 3:49 AM

Thanks to all of you for the replies!

One important thing I forgot to mention is that I am doing a VHS to DVD transfer, and the video editing on this one would pretty much comprise of cutting or joining video files, which means that I won't lose quality by using MPEG, as I intend to do this losslessly.

As I have mentioned, I was concerned about the DV colorspace, and digitalfaq.com mentions that DV colorspace is usually harmful to analog color quality.
I just wasn't sure of the real-world difference between using a good DV camcorder pass-through, and a $100 MPEG-2 capture card. That's where my compromise lies!

Chienworks wrote on 10/27/2005, 4:21 AM

If you are planning on doing lossless cuts to MPEG files then Vegas Movie Studio is the wrong software. It will always reencode MPEG. Try something like womble (google it) for lossless MPEG cutting & splicing. Import your result into DVD Architect directly without using Vegas. If DVD Architect thinks the files are compliant with DVD standards and you're under 4.7GB then it will create the DVD without reencoding.