Downloading miniDV tape into laptop without loosing quality. Can it be done?

Question

I want to know if there is a way to download miniDV tape into my HP laptop and not loose any of the tapes quality. The laptop is running XP home, firewire connection, windows movie maker software.

Answer 1

Yes you can download the video from the camera to your laptop. To achieve the best quality, you should use the firewire connection and use a program that can capture DV. To achieve the best quality, you might want a big hard drive, or since you have a laptop, maybe an external one. DV can take up about 13GB/hour. And with DV, maybe programs support this format and it would easy to edit it.

For a free DV capturing program, try WinDV. Maybe people like using the program since you can record to and from the camera if you use the firewire connection.

Here's the link to the program. http://windv.mourek.cz/

Answer 2

It depends on the software you are using. If you are losing quality when you are transferring, its probably because your hard drive is too slow. More then likely you need to see if you can "throttle down" the speed at which it transfers, or you need to get a SCSI hard drive. This is expensive on a laptop. SCSI hard drives can read & write data faster.

I had this exact problem 5 years ago. I had to purchase a SCSI drive and card for my desktop computer in order to do it.

Answer 3

I really haven't any clue about the software you're using. you ought to be able to get 2 miniDV tapes on on DVD. move video on your computer as DV-AVI using Firewire. Convert it to MPEG2. author and burn to DVD.