DV Tape - Print to Tape

[willcassell]

I have recently been engaged in debate with a close friend of mine over an issue that has arisen through a short informative film we are making as part of a school assignment.
The assignment has been shot on DV tape with fairly high-end consumer (if that's not a misnomer...) cameras.
We have agreed that no editing should be done without the colaberation of all involved present to contribute and so it was with some degree of dissappointment that I agreed to let this friend of mine do some of the "trained-monkey-style" editing.

The problem arrose because he is too lazy to bring his tiny external harddrive to my place with the edited video on it.
He proposes that he compresses to some degree (I dissapprove of this because I believe that as much quality should be preserved as possible if the original data is not THAT fantastic in the first place...) or that he print it back to the DV tape out final cut pro.

Needless to say his is a Mac machine and mine, running Premiere Pro... is a Windows OS system.
The argument is as to whether there is a loss of quality in this process of going from tape to computer, editing, printing back to tape and then capturing AGAIN! to my computer.

I have done a similar thing in the past and had a significant loss of quality.

[jm1647]

Capturing from tape, editing on PC, and capturing again from tape....If he won't bring his hard drive, why not on DVD or something. How big is/are the file(s) when on the computer?

[willcassell]

well the thing is, I want them to encoded in AVI raw with as little loss of quality as possible because he wants to edit on his computer this little bit, so therefore we mulitply the chances of quality loss, making uncompressed the way to go, so for 12 minutes of video this will be a lot and he's a little illogical about it. He wants to print to tape to save him using more than one (god forbid) DVD...

it's not 5 hours of footage or anything... just probably more than one DVD worth uncompressed.
I asked today at school and found out that there is in fact some significant qualty loss, especially when transferring from mac to pc... or vice versa, don't know why but that's apparently how it goes. Makes sense in a sick twisted kind of way though

[swraman]

If you transfer in full DV quality from the camcorder, edit the file, and output it again to a DV tape (to be transferred to your computer), you will not loose much quality. You loose a lot of quality when you switch codecs somewherein the process.

As long as everything is done in DV format, it should be OK. This means that the video should never be encoded out ot DV, even if you are going to re-encode it back to DV afterward.

The bad thing is that DV encoding is not very good (3MB/s)...but for DV camcorders it's the only way to go (w/out loss of much quality).