MAC Os X Video capture question.
 

I'm about to start capturing all my Mini DV tape to the HD. I have a pair of Lacie 1 terabyte drives that I'm going to be using for storage. I'm only ever going to use this Video for the web, so there is no need to capture at anything higher than DVD quality. What I'm wondering is if there is a way on the Mac OS X to capture via FIREWIRE directly to a format other than Raw AVI, a format thats closer to the DVD quality that I'm looking for but still natively editable within Final cut.

Reason, I have over 400 Full Mini DV tapes of content, and capturing all to Raw format would just take WAY to much HD space. But I would like to be able to keep all the captured footage so that if later, I feel like editing or changing something, maybe create a new available format of my video, I could do so in a batch of everything at once.

I also need a format that Final cut pro works in native so I can edit etc without all the re encoding. Ideas?

I can't answer your question, but check out this site

http://www.videohelp.com/

its quite helpful and filled with information

I have a duplicator that will rip your 1 hour tapes to high bitrate DVD, then you can use whatever apps you want to compress it out.

We charge $10 per tape but I am sure you can buy a duplicator yourself.

If you want to burn them from Minidv to DVD, you can simply use Toast.

Here's a link to a tutorial http://www.rice.edu/fondren/dmc/howto/toast/index.html


Other than that, I've never done exactly what you want, I always capture via Final Cut Pro.

Good luck

Actually, OS X can do this anyways, when you plug the Mini DV camera in it asks you if you would like to burn a DVD and takes care of everything from rewinding the tape to capturing and burning the DVD. I was wanting to actually do this, but skip the burning of the actual DVD. There should be a setting to choose you file save location, I just have not found it yet. :)

hm... it's best to start with the best quality in your edits then compress it down to the size you need with compressor or via final cut.

capping at low quality - i know you can RT cap it but i don't think that's dvd quality.