Import DV video from camcorder tape to a single DV file?

Matthew Morgan wrote:

If it were me, I would use iMovie '11 to import as Events and then go to your Movie>iMovie Events folder and copy the files to your archive disk. Once that's done you can delete them from iMovie.

Understood.....but that leaves me with a bunch of .dv files for each tape that I would then have to re-assemble into a movie to make them usable/viewable from the archive disk. I didn't want to go through that trouble.....and potential loss in quality? (i.e., I don't understand the potential quality losses that might occur when assembling a bunch of .dv clips into a viewable movie within iMovie).

My goal was to end up with one large disk .dv file per tape so that I can watch the disk versions instead of pulling out the camcorder and tapes every time. A copy of the tape at the original quality level to a single file is all I want. No editing desired. (sorry if I'm repeating myself on that point needlessly).

So......If the single .mov file out of Quicktime 7 Pro is the same quality level as the original .dv camcorder tape, then maybe I can just quit here and go that route and not be so concerned about ending up with a .dv file.

So the ultimate question then is: Is the .mov file from Quicktime 7 Pro the same quality as the original source tape byte for byte?

Wow. I did some research into this last night and I'm stunned by the complexities of dealing with video in general.

But specifically, there seems to be a large amount of confusion about how to get maximum import and export quality out of the iMovie, Final Cut, and Quicktime/Quicktime Pro applications. iMovie in particualr seems to be throttled in certain ways with regard to video export quality that necessitates people to update to Final Cut to get maximum quality (which is understandable from an Apple profit motive viewpoint, I suppose). I read thread after thread of conversations discussing difficulties with generating quality exports from iMovie.

I'm now thinking that Apple software simply may not be the way to go for what I want to do, which is a simple archiving task with no quality loss. DV file in from tape, DV file out to disk....with the same quality.

Why is this so hard? 😟

Are the Adobe software suites (e.g., Premiere) any better for this simple task? Any other recommendations?

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the continuing feedback...

Yes, they are consumer DV camcorders.

Understood and agreed on the quality compromises of consumer devices throughout the whole chain....which is precisely why I don't want to degrade it any further during the archiving process. 🙂

As a starting point, I'm going to try an experiment with just one of the tapes before I decide on my final approach. I'm going to use the iMovie slice/dice-on-import capture method to create a bunch of DV files....and assemble the resulting DV files into a movie that I then output at the maximum quality setting. And then.....I'll drop the $30 on Quicktime 7 Pro as an experiemnt to create one large DV file as output. I'll then compare the iMovie and Quicktime 7 Pro results to the original tape and see how everything looks.

Will post my feelings on the results......

If anyone has any continuing feedback on the topic, I welcome it. This is an interesting learning experience.

Thank you thesurreyfriends! Good lord....I never would have known about that because I haven't yet seen it mentioned in any of the reading that I've done on this topic.

This is indeed something akin to what I want to do. When I click that cache-xx.mov file, it does play the whole set of clips as one unit. Ultimately, this is what I want to be able to do.

I can use Airplay from my Macbook to stream it to my TV, but when I do that the audio and video are playing back slightly out of sync....which I've seen before when streaming home video off my Macbook via Airplay. I would imagine that if I plug the Macbook high def video out directly into my TV that this problem will go away. I'm guessing it's some kind of latency or audio/video sync problem with Airplay? I've also heard that this can be caused by how you hook up your home theater components with the routing of the audio and video. Not sure which is the culprit in this case...but that's not the primary issue of this thread.

The main drawback to this approach is that there are scan line flickers on the top line of the video when viewed in Quicktime, which is slightly annoying. I've gotten rid of that in the past by using the 'crop video on playback' feature in the VLC media player to remove the first horizontal line of the video (great feature of VLC!), but Quicktime has no option like that.

The second drawback is that this play-as-one-file playback approach depends on that cache-xx.mov file. If anything ever happens to it (perhaps it could get corrupted somehow or maybe even accidentally deleted) then I'm stuck with a bunch of clips that would then need to be fiddled with to get them to play back as one. I'm a little concerned about that because it could occur far down the road.

But overall, yes, this is what I want to be able to do. Thanks for this tip!

I will continue to search for the best solution to my initial question though, which is capturing off tape to a single full quality DV file. I think my next step to try to achieve that will be to spend the $30 on Quicktime 7 Pro to see if it captures the tape properly. I would be able to play those files through the VLC media player and could therefore crop the first line on playback to get rid of the flicker that's so common in this process.

The complex road continues. And this isn't even my most complicated video scenario! Scanning off the old tapes to a single DV file is possible with QT7 Pro or even using this method of play-all-clips as a work-around. The much harder scenario is doing something like taking a month of video clips from two iPhones and several different pocket cameras and trying to assemble that into a single movie for that month. Yikes! I'll probably put a gun to my head when I get to that part of this video archiving task. 🙂

I will continue to report back here on my results with the QT7 Pro test for those who are interested...More to come....

surreyfriends, this is a very interesting idea, and I agree that if it works and the original quality is maintained throughout the process then this is absolutely the best way for me to go. I will definitely try it to see how it works!

Question: What is DV Stream? Does the discussion thread at the link below contain an accurate explanation? If so, then this seems like it will indeed solve every one of my goals.

Let me know your thoughts....Thanks!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1773310?start=0&tstart=0

Hi Maccanaut....What specific steps and settings are you using in QT7 Pro to achieve your successful video captures? I also purchased QT7 Pro to try out various ways of capturing, so I would be interested to know your workflow in QT7 Pro.