I got a 250 gig LaCie D2 Extreme firewire 800 drive this morning. One of the leads that came with it an iLink cable which will connect my Canon DV camera direct to the drive. Is there a way to take the video from the camera direct to the drive without degrading or compressing it?
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DV straight to harddrive
- Thread starter colinet
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Well isn't that one of the options under compression option for whatever video editing program you're using? Uncompressed or Raw?
nope
any time the video comes out through the firewire and into the computer, it's compressing it with the DV codec. Otherwise, there'd be no way to fit all that info through the FW 400 iLink cable.
Oh, and even though you can hook the camera up to the drive, I don't think that means it will capture the video to disk. The computer needs to be in between, telling the camera to play and the disk to record and all the decoding/encoding. There are direct-to-disk things out there like the Firestore and Quickstream DV, but this is not what you have.
Check out www.2-pop.com for really in depth stuff on video editing.
any time the video comes out through the firewire and into the computer, it's compressing it with the DV codec. Otherwise, there'd be no way to fit all that info through the FW 400 iLink cable.
Oh, and even though you can hook the camera up to the drive, I don't think that means it will capture the video to disk. The computer needs to be in between, telling the camera to play and the disk to record and all the decoding/encoding. There are direct-to-disk things out there like the Firestore and Quickstream DV, but this is not what you have.
Check out www.2-pop.com for really in depth stuff on video editing.
When a miniDV camera takes the actual picture, it is already compressing it 5:1 (known as DV25) when it goes onto tape. When you capture it to hard drive, you really aren't doing anything in the way of compression; you're really just moving the data.
Compression comes into play if you actually have it compressed by codec (for instance Avid's 15:1s which compresses it 3 times over standard miniDV compression and removes 1 field (in America, consumer miniDV cameras take 30i which means there are 2 interaced images for every shot-- you can save space but degrade image by removing 1 field; this is used for offlining))
Compression is really used when sampling analogue formats or using uncompressed formats or low compression formats (DV50, DV100, etc.) We're talking much more expensive cameras using different media (Digibeta, etc.)
So to answer your question succinctly, colinet, you aren't degrading or compressing your video when trasferring from your camera. That's the resolution and quality your camera took it at. If you want to be able to transcode without a computer to the hard drive, that takes different hardware (it is available though for in-the-field use.) You still need electronics to adjust the data speed to the drive and transfer timecode, etc.
Compression comes into play if you actually have it compressed by codec (for instance Avid's 15:1s which compresses it 3 times over standard miniDV compression and removes 1 field (in America, consumer miniDV cameras take 30i which means there are 2 interaced images for every shot-- you can save space but degrade image by removing 1 field; this is used for offlining))
Compression is really used when sampling analogue formats or using uncompressed formats or low compression formats (DV50, DV100, etc.) We're talking much more expensive cameras using different media (Digibeta, etc.)
So to answer your question succinctly, colinet, you aren't degrading or compressing your video when trasferring from your camera. That's the resolution and quality your camera took it at. If you want to be able to transcode without a computer to the hard drive, that takes different hardware (it is available though for in-the-field use.) You still need electronics to adjust the data speed to the drive and transfer timecode, etc.
USOC is doing just that
Everyone here as pretty much already answered your question, but I thought you might be interested to know that the USOC is doing exactly what you are trying to do, expcept for the compression issues. I am on the Olympic Team, and we have a system that mounts a HD on the camera. The HD is configured while connected to a computer, and can capture and encode using a variety of codecs, and simultaniously recording to a DV tape. This way when the HD is plugged into a laptop, the video can simply be dumped to the laptop.
Hope that was of some help,
Brett
Everyone here as pretty much already answered your question, but I thought you might be interested to know that the USOC is doing exactly what you are trying to do, expcept for the compression issues. I am on the Olympic Team, and we have a system that mounts a HD on the camera. The HD is configured while connected to a computer, and can capture and encode using a variety of codecs, and simultaniously recording to a DV tape. This way when the HD is plugged into a laptop, the video can simply be dumped to the laptop.
Hope that was of some help,
Brett