Digital 8 and Marvel G200TV

[dchip]

I have been using the Marvel G200TV to capture my old 8mm camcorder footage and then compress the raw avi's into mpeg-1 format. It has worked real well and I even managed to use the clunky Avid Cinema to make a few short movies out of some of the better footage.

Now I am about to step up to a Digital 8 camcorder and want to know what, if any, problems I might encounter with such a unit and the G200TV.

Will the "digital" info be grabbed by the G200 as smoothly as it does my old 8mm camcorder playback?

Do these "digital" files make bigger AVI's than regular 8mm playback?

Does the S-Video hookup actually provide better quality than the standard RCA jacks?

Are AVI's made from "digital" input as easily edited as info from analog tape?

I realize Digital 8 will be NTSC output going into the G200 which should be fine but I just am worried that with so much more color and sharpness in the video, I will end up with huge file sizes or just too much information for the Marvel G200 to handle.

Any thoughts or advice appreciated.

[ccc]

Hi,

I Have a Sony Digital 8 cam, and a Marvel G400. What you are saying about this digital capturing can't be done with the marvel. For digital capturing, u need a IEEE1394 card.
The marvel will capture from the RCA or S-video ANALOG output. (normally S-video is better...)
The difference with your 8mm is that the D8 quality will be better, so the overall quality on your PC will be better also.
So no difference for the pc qua size of Avi or so... Just Better quality

[Grigory]

"Do these "digital" files make bigger AVI's than regular 8mm playback?"

NO. However, high contrast scenes may have several percent higher data rate, but normally within Marvel limits.

Does the S-Video hookup actually provide better quality than the standard RCA jacks?

YES. S-video connection will provide better color purity.

I realize Digital 8 will be NTSC output going into the G200 which should be fine but I just am worried that with so much more color and sharpness in the video, I will end up with huge file sizes or just too much information for the Marvel G200 to handle.

NTSC output contains as much color and sharpness as analog NTSC standard allows in ideal case. All DV "extras" are thrown out to fit in specifications.
So, in most situations Marvel will work with such video very well. I had some problems with few frames of video that went out of marvel datarate control and were unplayable later. Increasing compression for this particular (short) piece of video solved the problem. Actually, such inconvenience is small in comparison with VHS tape jitter and frame drops I got with RR_G.

If you decided to buy D8 - do this without doubt. Anyway, you'll get much better results than with video8. Later you can go to 1394, as I did.

Grigory

[dchip]

Thanks for the info, all. My fear of using Digital 8 video on my trusty G200 TV is alleviated.

[Stewman]

Actually, wouldn't the file size be a bit smaller? I say this because with traditional analog capture your introducing more line noise (for lack of a better term) into the capture, whereas with digital there is none. So for example, let's say you capture an image which is black using analog input,..noise is introduced so you have more colorspace to compress, with a digital capture, you have almost zero noise and thus less colorspace to compress. So I'm assuming you have better image and a lower file size.

[Grigory]

Stewman,

You are correct in your noise estimations. However, do not forget that the picture itself - say a tree with leaves, has a lot of details. D8 camcorder will record a lot more of these details on a tape:

VHS luma bandwidth is about 240 lines vs actual 420 (from lens & CCD) for PAL digital8.
You have to take into account some 1-CCD matrix artefacts (not visible on real-life images), which probably fill remaining 100 lines, giving comressor up to 500 lines of fine "noise" resolution. Even when this signal is going through 400 lines analog S-video output, it contains a lot more data to compress then noise-free VHS.
Chroma components have full broadcast quality resolution of 1.5 MHz (sorry to mix units) vs 500kHz for VHS. So, the total amount of data to compress is at least doubled. You have to add here some small noise on analog path, some (invisible for you, but present) DV compression and camcorder DAC artefacts, better sharpness and reaction on scene changes because of digital nature, ...

If you compress this signal with software compressor at constant quality, the file size will be much bigger for D8 source, except the case when the image is completely of constant color.

With RR, the quality is automatically adjusted to give you required data rate. I got several clips when this data rate control went out of normal operation for D8. I suppose the algorithm was developed for analog VCR's with lower level of detail. So, the file size will be kept under the limit you specify, but there may be frames with unexpected size. VHS cannot make such frames.

Grigory

[dchip]

I am not totally committed to Digital 8 yet. I saw a Sony TRV8 Mini DV today that has me thinking I might want to make the leap to DV. My current configuration is as follows:

-Pentium III 450 w/ 128MB PC100
-ASUS P3BF Motherboard (no IEEE support)
-Western Digital 18GB Ultra ATA 66 7200 RPM
-Promise Tech Ultra 66 PCI HDD controller
-Matrox Marvel G200 TV
-Win 98 SE
-Avid Cinema
-Panasonic software MPEG-1 encoder.

This is a solid system and I have captured numerous hours of old 8mm camcorder footage and am yet to drop even a single frame. The HDD absolutely flies with the Promise card.

If I go with a Mini DV camcorder, what will I be facing?

What hardware can I keep and what will have to be scrapped?

Mainly, other than the camcorder, what will I have to buy and what roughly will it cost?

What software will I need?

Does Mini DV make AVI's or some other format and just how large are the files?

I don't what to end up building a whole new system, but I find DV very appealing.

[Owen]

You're system should be fine for what you want to do. I recently purchased a D8 camcorder. The biggest thing that I have noticed between my old 8mm and the D8, is that the D8 has a lot brighter, sharper images.

...Owen

[Keith Wiebe]

I faced the same question (basically) when I bought the Sony TR7000 for a better archive than I could achieve with svhs or hi-8. The Rainbow Runner did a good job with digital 8 but still showed some extra graininess in backgronunds,etc. compared to original. I gave up on RR and got a Canopus Raptor and the quality level has been a lot better and no more small jitters here and there! (my main concern with my RR). Some people claim to never have any jitters but I couldn't get rid of them and my Raptor doesn't have any yet that I could tell. If you sell off your Marvel and get a Raptor SE (and sell off the Premiere LE) and get the Ulead 5.2pro you can upgrade realitively inexpensively and start to achieve broadcast quality or at least closer to it. Firewire has been the answer for me! My only complaint of the digital 8 has been some color fringing under dimmer interior lighting and with decent lighting it looks terrific. No more background noise and dropouts like with the hi-8 stuff. Don't look back. Try making a blue background with white lettering with your marvel and then try it with the Raptor and you'll see why I dumped the Rainbow Runner! (probably could have been fixed in software but Matrox apparently has wrote the last updates for the Rainbow Runner).
Keith Wiebe