On Mon, 5 Feb 2001 17:39:19 +1100, "Pete D" wrote:

>What most people seem to forget is that with DV the encoding has already
>taken place in the camcorder, losses have already taken place so once you
>get it into the PC as long as you don't do any transitions etc you will have
>no further losses. Any transitions, titles, etc will of course cause some
>sort of degregation however small.

The above is correct - and the amount of loss depends on the
codec used (some early Apple codecs were pretty bad, the
Spark caused slight darkening and green-shift, etc.), but
the Canopus Raptor causes little change (and is faster-
rendering than most). You can see frame-grabs of
original footage vs. the 10th generation of forced
renderings with the Raptor codec of a short Mini-DV clip,
at the end of the camcorder reviews at:
www.David-Ruether-Photography.com/camcorder-comparison.htm
There are some changes in the image, but even at the
10th rendering, they are subtle...