Mini Dv Camcorder Questions... Please Read?

Question

When burning the mini dv to a dvd, will the quality be really downgraded? I wanted a Hard drive camcorder but I had one and the quality once burned looked horrible. What camera should look for to not have such bad quality when burning dvds?

Answer 1

Burning to a DVD should not worsen the quality, unless your shooting 35mm film or something... Which I assume your not...

What might be happening is your using some really aggressive compression. If you try to fit 10 hours onto one DVD, then the quality will probably be downgraded... But something more reasonable, like an hour and a half, maybe, wouldn't hurt the quality. That's how the M-PEG2 compression works.

For Mini-DV, which btw is the highest quality format in the consumer range right now, the quality will not be downgraded. Yes, hard drive camcorders do generally have worse quality, as your standard camcorder hard disk can't hold as much data as a Mini-DV tape can so it gets really compressed. But this is improving.

For quality, go for Mini-DV, and unless you have or will soon be getting HDTV and BluRay and all that, then ignore all the "HD" hype.

Answer 2

miniDV format is even used for semi- and pro production...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDV

Some prosumer vcams record miniDV unto Firestore portable hard disk drives w/ capacity as high as 250gb for fastest import during editing.