Blackmagic Forum

I have a bunch of miniDV tapes to digitize for a friend. He plans to do some basic editing using a simple TBD software app.
Unfortunately, my PC/Win hardware no longer offers straight DV SD capture via IEEE1394 (and I don't want to spend €€€ purchasing the 3/4 cables needed to make this work over USB-C).
I am hesitating between two options, both involving HDMI (576i) to UltraStudio Mini Recorder:
- Capture with Media Express with Motion JPEG/AVI
- Capture with another tool allowing to produce DV SD/AVI files (but of course this is not lossless: DV tape -> YUV 4:2:0 decode to HDMI -> DV reencode)

The question is: in this specific scenario, would there be a noticeable difference in quality/usability between MJPEG (50 Mbps) and DV SD (25 Mbps) ?
(assuming MJPEG is compatible with any consumer-grade editing software, like DV SD is)

Thanks for comments

MediaExpress is very limited with codec option. It's basic capture app and choices are not very good (except uncompressed).
For SD you can use MJPEG at high settings. It won't be much worse. It's not the best codec, but should be ok in this case.
Best would be to use firewire and capture DV as is. I assume those cards are rather very cheap now. You can get PCI-E one for 15$.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Best would be to use firewire and capture DV as is. I assume those cards are rather very cheap now. You can get PCI-E one for 15$.

Yes, agree but PCI-E isn't an option for my laptops (nor is Express Card), and the Firewire->USB-C route is more convoluted/expensive (see e.g.

Using my workflow (i.e. through HDMI) I wonder if the 50 Mbps MJPEG codec would buy me anything compared to 25 Mbps DVSD ? MJPEG is 4:2:2 but the source (DV tapes) is no better than 4:2:0 anyway...

You are re-encoding so it will be worse. Set MJPEG to 80-90% and should be close enough to the source.
Don't look at it in the way of 4:2:0 vs 4:2:2. It's about meaningless here.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:You are re-encoding so it will be worse. Set MJPEG to 80-90% and should be close enough to the source.
Don't look at it in the way of 4:2:0 vs 4:2:2. It's about meaningless here.

Thanks Andrew
Digging further, I may just have found a good deal for the Apple Firewire->Thunderbolt adapter & a Firewire400 to 800 adapter on eBay So I could well end up digitizing DV w/o conversion (and keeping the source metadata !)...