DV-In?

Well I am short on money so I had to go for something cheaper than the Sony DCR-TRV18 so I chose the DCR-TRV16E. What I would like to know is what is DV-In? And what benefits do you get out of it?And should I just get the DCR-TRV16 that only has DV-Out?

I would also like to know what the picture and sound it like on this camera.

Thanks for you help (hopefully)

Owen

 

DV-in, as I understand it, allows you to record a video from the computer back to the camcorder.

 

Crazy is right - i have a MiniDV camcorder & it dosn't have DV-in but my friend's camcorder does so basically we can just store nice DV quality footage on MiniDV tapes.

You do, however, loose some quality but it's hardly noticable.

I'd say get DV-in. It'll save you valueble harddrive space

Mushi

 

Actually you don't loose quality. We're talking about FireWire here, right?

 

Ryan_W is right. You are not loosing any quality. This is digital technology, right? One and zeros don't lie my friend.

 

You do loose quality because you have compressed the footage from the camcorder because you can't use completely uncompressed video on a computer very well.

Try rendering totally uncompressed video in after effects & you'll notice the file size is a lot bigger than when you capture.
Then when you record in back to your DV camcorder it compresses it again.
If you were to do this over & over the quality wouldn't look as good as the first generation.

Thats what i read in a camcorder magazine.

Mushi

 

That would be the case if you were working with analog, but, unless you actually perform additional compression while editing your files on a computer, you should not see images degraded when transferring from camera to computer and computer to camera.

The reason is that the analog to digital conversion happens in the camera, as it is recording. The tape records a digital file, not analog images. The conversion does not happen during firewire transfer. The transfer is essentially the same as copying a file from one disk to another.

If you use compression, (like Sorensen, Divx, On2) while editing, the image will change and be different when uploaded back to a camera. Before uploading back to a camera, you have to convert back to miniDV format which will attempt to compress what you compressed before.

You can check out this link on Cnet for a little more info. Check out the "generation loss" link for a little definition too.

Have fun.

[EDIT:
In Mushiman's example, he is correct that an uncompressed file is larger than miniDV.
You will loose the digital advantage if you convert your video from miniDV to uncompressed then back to miniDV when you are done, because miniDV will try to re-compress the new file.

To prevent degradation, you need to edit entirely in miniDV format, with your editor's "Do not recompress" option on. This way, the 1's and zero's that make up each frame do not get changed or degrade.]