For years I've been using my mini DV camcorders Firewire to transfer video to my iMac to edit with iMovie2. Just purchased a Panasonic SDR-S150 Mpeg2 camcorder. For important videos I can go camcorder to PC and export to my Mini DV to again edit on my iMac. ALL digital that way. But for like YouTube pieces how much quality do I lose by sending my Mpeg2 video via SVHS connection from new SDR-S150 camcorder to my Canon Mini-DV camcorder which in turn then exports via firewire directly to my iMac? Realize it's digital to analogue to digital but wondering if there is a ballpark percentage of quality loss doing this? Appreciate other comments on my 'shortcut.' My first and only effort (SDR arrived today) found my mini-DV copy looking very good on my TV. Assume from that point on, from mini-DV firewire to iMac and final movie exported back to mini-DV there is no further signal loss.
I am a bit puzzled why you operate this way. Wouldn't it be be much easier to just convert your material to DV-AVI on your PC? Here's a method that can be used (written for a somwhat different purpose, but it also works for MPEG files): http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/tutorials/dvdedit.php
The issue arises because my new Mpeg2 camcorder will not export to my iMac for editing with iMovie. I can use the camcorder’s program (MotionSD Studio similar to your program LINK) to import the video to my VAIO PC in Mpeg 2 format. I must then get the video out of the VAIO to my iMac. I can use such as Sony’s Movie Shaker which will export the clip from VAIO PC to my MiniDV camcorer in my choice of Mpeg2 8mbps, Mpeg2 4mbps or DV-AVI. Per your reply I assume I should export from PC using DV-AVI, correct? Then I use my MiniDV camcorders firewire to export to iMovie in my iMac computer. Ex. A one minute YouTube video that does not require the best quality possible. I could SKIP most of the above by transferring video from my new Mpeg2 camcorder via SVHS cable directly to my MiniDV and then instantly firewire it to iMovie. Hence my curiousity question..... do we know how much quality is lost by going from Mpeg2 using SVHS to MiniDV and then back to digital via firewire to iMovie. Aside from saving time I would avoid using a second computer and the VAIO’s TWO additional import/export programs. It may be I will just need to try it both ways and view the results. Thanks for your suggestion.
Editing video can be best done on a format that does not use interframe compression. For that reason MPEG is not a very good format for editing. DV codecs hav a relative low level of compression (i.e. 1:5) and although it is not lossless, you will not loose a lot of quality when compressing in DV-format. Therfore yes, using Dv-AVI is an excellent choice. But in stead of getting it back to tape I would just store it on a portable drive from your PC and get it to your Mac. Or isn't it possible to read files written to a hard drive from Windows based PC with a Mac? Sorry, don't have Mac experience... The determining factors for quality in your alternative way of working (transferring via analog to your miniDV and import that in your Mac) are actually the quality of the analog output of your Panasonic, the cables you use between the camcorders and the analog recording electronics in your miniDV, so it is impossible to tell a fixed percentage. compressing to DV-AVI will not lead to a significant quality loss. But anyway, if your end purpose is to put it on Youtube, it all will be accepatble because the quality on YouTube is limited anyway.
