Exporting raw video from miniDV to DVD

Ok, clarify for me now.

You want to "backup" your video from your MiniDV tapes, onto a DVD?

And you have captured, digitized, your DV from tape to your computer using iMovie.

FYI:

5 minutes of DV is 1GB
1 DVD-R single layer is 4.4GB

Youll get 20 minutes of useable original quality footage, in DV format (inside a QT movie container .mov). Which you can then pass onto others.

But if you really want to "backup" your footage, leave it on tape, it holds 60 mins and isnt going to get scratched like a DVD.

If you want to pass your work to someone else, may I suggest an external drive?


perhaps i need more info.

What are you trying to "GET" to the client exactly? What do they NEED specifically from you?

The original RAW footage?

The movie you created from the footage in iMovie?


A movie "shared" into iDVD is not editable in the sense that now a movie clip is becoming a DVD video.

If you are looking for someone to be able to open iMovie and edit like you have, thats something totally different.

a better option?

So it sounds like you're sending you footage to a pro (I'm keying in on "production quality") to work with?

For what it's worth, a pro editor will ALWAYS prefer the original footage on tape, not a DVD. If giving up the originals is not an option, make a DV-DV copy and send those. A pro will always prefer the cleanest possible footage...camera master first, digital duplication second, compressed file or analog copy only if those are for some reason not possible.

A DVD does not have the timecode or the seperate audio channels of the original, and there is a quality loss any time you compress. DVD is also just kind of a pain to work with. We like to shuttle tapes around and above all, automate the capture process with deck control while we go get coffee.

Of course, "Production Quality" means different things to different people...none of this may matter to you. Trying to help!

Of course the original tape is best, but a digital dupe is an exact copy and thusly still of the same quality.

Also, lets not confuse putting something onto a DVD as data and a VIDEO.

A DVD-R is just a CD-R with more space.

Its when you actually "Build" a DVD that the data you put onto the DVD-R makes it into a DVD for Video on a set top player.

If you want to backup stuff to a DVD-R thats cool, the DV footage is still bit for bit exactly the same copy, but its only 20 minutes of RAW footage. And in that case, an external drive is best. OR of course a DV tape.

Okay, I think you would want to export it as a DV stream. This is practically the same quality as the original data on your miniDV tape.

I backup my movies in DV stream all the time. The following article should help: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=165256. The resulting file should have a .dv extension to it.

You've got to decide on what media to export to, because 1 hour of DV video takes up slightly more than 11GB. An external harddisk would be the easiest. But if you're using DVDR or DVD-DL, then you've got to chop the movie into chunks of the appropriate length, i.e. about 4GB (or about 20 min) for DVDR and 9GB (or about 45 min) for DVD-DL. This is easy to do in iMovie.

supermacdesign said:

Ok, so who knows this one?

I want to take raw footage from MiniDV to DVD and keep the footage usable for production quality.

I’ve already digitized the MiniDV footage into iMovie. Now how should I export it so that it can be used by possible other producers?

Needs to be high-quality.

Thanks.

Click to expand...

Just keep the DV footage on the DV tapes....much cheaper and easier than any other solution

But what about making a dub of the tapes for viewing. Say I want to give someone a copy of the raw footage (unedited, not necessarily uncompressed) for review on DVD. How would you guys go about doing that?