Hi, I've been messing around with different codecs when capturing DV from firewire in Premier 6.5 and I was wondering what experiences other people have with them, and which they prefer. At the moment I'm using either the Microsoft DV codec, the Mainconcept DV codec or the Cannopus Software DV codec. The Cannopus codec seems to give much sharper results, but also seems to add a bit of grain - also re-encoding the movie when I've finished editing it takes ages (I set it off before going to bed usually). The Mainconcept codec seems very similar to the Microsoft DV one quality-wise (a bit blurry), although the encoding rate is a bit faster. Out of the above I probably prefer the Cannopus codec. Are there any other DV codecs out there people are using and would recommend? Cheers, Taq.
Hello taq, Agree on your opinion on the quality of the DV codecs. I tend to use the Canopus codec on my desktop with Canopus hardware and the MS codec on the laptop with firewire. I don't think I've experienced the slow encode you talk about with the Canopus codec. Does it still take a long time to encode even if you have the 'always recompress' option unchecked in Premiere?
tbh I'm not sure if that box is ticked or not ) I'll have to investigate further, but cheers for the tip. Usually encode time isn't that much of an issue to me anyway as my home videos are usually only about 10 mins or so long. It was just that this particular one was an hour and 20mins, took 6 hours to encode and took up about 18gig of hdd space! Cheers, Taq.
If yo use the editor that Canopus makes, you can save to a reference file which creates pointers to the original AVI for unaltered sections so the file size will be much smaller for edited footage. Only the sections you have added effects/transitions get included in the new file. You end up with a smaller file and the encoding should be faster as well.
