Best quality MiniDV transfer to digital

First of all, miniDV is digital. It's not analog.
The key to preserving quality is keeping the video in its original digital codec,
in other words not recompressing. I believe you have two options:

Capture them as .dv files into iMovie.
This is probably the least time-consuming option,
since the digital data remains in a stream format,
just like the DV stream coming down your Firewire cable.

Capture them as .mov files using the DV codec.
This might involve exporting them to QuickTime files.
If it can be done without recompressing, there's no loss of quality.
The advantage of archiving as QuickTime movies is that
they will be quicker to look and possibly edit in the future.

Capture the video from your GL2 with iMovie, Final Cut Expres/Pro, FootTrack, CatDV or similar app.

Note: If you use iMovie 08/09/11, just archive the .dv files that it creates. Do not export DV from iMovie - when you export DV from iMovie, it does single-field processing, halving the resolution of the output.

IMO if you have Final Cut Express or Pro, use that to capture the video, as you will get QuickTime .mov files that can be used in almost any app.

DV takes about 13GB/hour of video, so you can estimate how much disk space you will need. You can use iDVD to burn the videos to DVD. For burning purposes, only the +length in time+ matters - you can fit up to about 2 hours of video on a single-layer DVD-R or +R, or about 4 hours on dual-layer media.

If your interest is to simply transfer the material to a more convenient format for playback - *and you don't want to edit the video* - get a DVD-Recorder with firewire input (eg Panasonic DMR-EZ28).

Connect your camera to the recorder via firewire, drop in a DVD-R (or DVD+R) disk, hit record on the machine and play on the camera.

The transfer, encoding and burning happens in real time.

Rinse and repeat until all the tapes are transferred.

If you do want to edit in the future, go with the transfer to the computer as noted in earlier posts. The highest quality transfer is simply bringing in the material as DV. Once transferred, put onto your tapes in a cool, dry, dark location and hold onto the camera. Drives fail. And, they fail more often and catastrophically than tapes.

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I'm about to archive a huge mini dv library (also planning on running some vhs and hi8 through the miniDV deck to digitize to hard drive). Not changing codec clearly makes sense. I'm considering using QT Pro to record tapes. The codec get info reveals on a test is: "Integer (Little Endian), DV/DVCRPRO - NTSC, Timecode"

Question is, is this listed codec the mini dv original codec or do I really need to use FCP? Or is using FCP going to just generate the exact same file anyway? (Tried using imovie but it breaks up the tape into sections at the smallest hiccup in the control track and I just want 1 file per tape.)

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Final Cut Express will deal with DV material just fine.

DV/DVCPro NTSC is the codec of choice for DV material in FCE.

All your analog material should be converted to the same codec. It may not look as splendid but that is the problem with uprezing source material. Hi8 starts out at 400 lines and can look pretty good when converted. VHS is another story. It began life in a 240 line format that was often recorded with really marginal equipment. If the vhs material looks really grim, you may find it worth your while to run it through a time base corrector when converting. It will help stabilize the image and color timing errors.

Good luck.

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