Why is it so difficult to capture DV tape on a Mac?

I dusted my old Sony D8 TRV320E and connected it to Mac mini 2018 via the Firewire-Thunderbolt adapters and booted first to Sequoia 15.2.

Final Cut Pro 11.0 imports interlaced 720x576 DVC - PAL (DVCAM, dvcp) as described in my previous post. It creates a new clip at each scene break. Weirdly always the very last frame of such scene's clip is from the next scene, I wonder if this is intentional. I could not provoke any extra tiny clips -- a bad tape or dirty playhead might produce such hiccups.

I then booted that Mac mini 2018 to Mojave 10.14.6 and tested the old QuickTime Player 7 Pro (the Pro license is not sold anymore and I do not know if it is required for DV import). Its "Device Native" preference...

...imports also 720x576 25 fps bottom field first interlaced, overall 30.5 Mb/s, timecode .mov (16 bit 48.0 kHz 1536 kb/s PCM Little / Signed) from that PAL camcorder. All scenes are imported to the same .mov (no automatic new clip at each scene break).

In Mojave the newer QuickTime Player 10.5 imports the same way as it does in Sequoia with its "Maximum" and "High" options: imported footage is blend/mean deinterlaced as progressive so there are those ghost lines in moving objects no matter what.

The old QuickTime Player 7 Pro has "Use high-quality video setting when available" and with it an interlaced clip displays comb lines (see below) and without it only a single field is displayed so no comb lines and no ghost lines are present in that display mode either.

Interlaced material is supposed to be viewed on an old TV, not on a progressive computer screen. FCP imports .dv as interlaced so the user might see ugly interlacing lines in moving objects. QT Player deinterlaces and blends those temporally different fields together so the user might see ugly ghost lines in moving objects.

Usually interlaced and rectangular pixel .dv is deinterlaced and scaled to square pixels so those ugly technical details are no more present on a computer screen.

Importing and editing .dv is lossless but bad tapes and possible dropped frames are flies in the ointment. If there are lots of dropped frames or import glitches, then the import app might see that as a timecode break and dutifully create tiny clips. Some apps like the old iMovie 1-6 have an option to ignore such dropouts and NOT to break scenes into clips:

One option is to buy an old Mac with built-in Firewire and support for El Capitan or High Sierra and use iMovie HD 6.0.3 to import such DV/D8 tapes as .dv. Then either edit them with iMovie or copy the .dv clips to a newer Mac. Such old Macs should not cost much. Or use some service to import the tapes.

I don’t believe that QTP captures tape differently to FCP except for FCP capturing in .dv and scene breaks whilst QTP captures in one long clip and either H264 or ProRes.

The difference is how it is displayed on playback.

That is why I suggested to import what you have captured in QTP into FCP which you do not appear to have tried .

Just to be clear, what I am suggesting you do is to take the captured video from QTP and import it into FCP . If you do this I believe that you will not see ghosting .

As you haven’t confirmed that you tried this in this post and your other post then maybe you misunderstood what I was suggesting you try.

Cartoonguy wrote:

I have imported the footage captured using QT into FCP and no change to the double image issue. FCP does not fix it. Tried turning deinterlacing on and off, lower field and upper field first. No options I have tried gets rid of the ghosting.

Yes, if a clip is interlaced and it displays the comb effect, you can deinterlace the same clip for viewing via blend/mean method (with VLC, for example) to display the ghost effect and then back to the comb effect if you turn that deinterlaced view option off.

But if the clip has been permanently deinterlaced and "burned-in" and re-encoded via that blend/mean method, then it is not possible to revert it to display the comb effect.

Later QuickTime versions seem to do the latter no matter what. Maybe the old QuickTime Player 7 Pro behaved differently but I have not really tested it because I have done all DV/D8 imports via iMovie 1.0.2-6.0.3(.4 is essentially the same). I have a very short such QT7-imported clip which MediaInfo reports to be interlaced but it very short with not much movements so visual evaluation is difficult. But QT7Pro requires Mojave or earlier and licenses for it are not sold anymore.

A while back I did a test in Sonoma.

Final Cut Pro 10.7 imports 720x576 25 fps bottom field first interlaced, overall 30.5 Mb/s, timecode .mov (DV, 16 bit 48.0 kHz 1536 kb/s PCM Little / Signed) from that PAL camcorder (4:3). My old .dv files archived from iMovie 1.0.2-6.0.3 are essentially the same except .dv, overall 28.8 Mb/s, no timecode and PCM Big / Signed.

So I'd recommend FCP import for the quality I am used to, although that must be deinterlaced for computer playback unless longer shutterspeed was used making the footage essentially progressive.

On the other hand, QuickTime Player.app "Maximum" setting imports 702x576 25 fps, overall 40.3 Mb/s, timecode .mov, ProRes 422, 16 bit 48.0 kHz 1536 kb/s PCM Big / Signed, and "High" setting imports 585x480, overall 4351 kb/s, timecode .mov, AVC, 48.0 kHz 320 kb/s AAC, both as progressive.

It seems DaVinci Resolve does not support DV import. But maybe Premiere does despite Adobe says contrary if legacy video device support is enabled:

If you can't use your camera or video output device after updating to macOS Sonoma 14.1 - Apple Support

In your previous post I suggested that you import the QTP capture into FCP to see if you still observe the ghosting, did you try that?

I ask this because I experimented today capturing HDV in QTP and saw the ghosting that I expect to see with interlaced video.

I then imported this video into iMovie and in iMovie I do not see the ghosting.

In that first post you said that you were capturing mini DV tapes via a Canopus 100.

If they are indeed mini DV tapes can you say why you are using a Canopus 100 ,which is an analog to digital converter, when you could connect the mini DV camcorder directly to your Mac( plus adaptors) without using the Canopus?

Perhaps these tapes are analog Hi8 instead of mini DV???

Here is a prior discussion on this topic:

Getting Firewire (and DV) to new macs - Apple Community

It all stems from Steve Jobs who decided what customers needed and has continued ever since.

When he considered DVD to be "old tech" he stopped DVD burners being installed on Macs. Later on FireWire became obsolete.

Apple is always looking forward and dismissing the past.

When it's dead it's dead and they decide when!

I know it's of no help but when I saw your previous post there was something very familiar about the photos. I can remember many years ago getting identical (double-image) results but unfortunately I can't remember how I dealt with it! So it's nothing new.

Since that computer and software is not Firewire compatible, is it possible that your capture card or connection cable is causing the problem? Which capture card are you using and how are you connecting it to the computer? Which version of USB or Thunderbolt is the card using?

What Mac and version of the OS are you running?