Should I recapture iMovie footage in FCE?

[ctakim]

I'm a newbie to FCE having just purchased it to tackle editing all my very old home movies (Super8 film converted to MiniDV, old analog 8mm tape, and more recent MiniDV digital and FlipHD videos). But I spent many hours capturing my early movies to iMovie 09 using the standard highest quality settings. Now that I have FCE4 and I want to keep the captured video as an archive for posterity, should I recapture these old movies using FCE?

My limited understanding is that you can set FCE to capture more information and separate audio streams while iMovie has a more limited fixed DV stream. Am I losing some quality/data by using the iMovie captures as my raw archival format?

TIA

 

[chrismacguy]

I'm a newbie to FCE having just purchased it to tackle editing all my very old home movies (Super8 film converted to MiniDV, old analog 8mm tape, and more recent MiniDV digital and FlipHD videos). But I spent many hours capturing my early movies to iMovie 09 using the standard highest quality settings. Now that I have FCE4 and I want to keep the captured video as an archive for posterity, should I recapture these old movies using FCE?

My limited understanding is that you can set FCE to capture more information and separate audio streams while iMovie has a more limited fixed DV stream. Am I losing some quality/data by using the iMovie captures as my raw archival format?

TIA

While you may be losing some, its probably not going to be a significant problem for your older footage, as it wouldnt have the quality to make use of the extra quality reimporting may provide. Id say just use FCE in future, as the iMovie Footage is probably of high enough quality.