Cut/Combine clips from a MiniDV camcorder

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Guest

Hello,
I am a novice WMM user, and would like to clarify some basic questions.
I want to capture and edit some MiniDV tapes from my camcorder,
I understand that when video capturing, if I save the original tape (60
mins) as WMV, it's a lossy conversion and I will lose some fidelity in sound
and video.
I also understand that WMM will automatically identify clips within the
stream.

If I combine clips from 2 different collections, will I lose additional
fidelity? i.e. will the quality of the audio/video degrade a second time
(the first time when saving from DV to WMV)?

Is there a way to tell WMM to NOT stitch the video clip at the boundaries
and just copy the WMV video clip verbatim? Or is that what it already does?

Thanks very much for your help.
 
yes, your understanding of it being some loss of quality when compressing to
WMV files...

and Movie Maker when saving a movie will recompress all the data again, and
you'll be into another round of losses... I don't know of anything that will
stitch together wmv files without recompressing them.

it sometimes reads worse thant it appears when you watch and listen to it...
try a small test sample... run it thru some recompressions and see what you
think of the losses. The losses might be acceptable.

the highest quality wmv files built into Movie Maker are 2.1 Mbps.... when I
use that format for editing, I use a custom profile that makes files at the
6 Mbps level.... see the Saving Movies > Custom WMV Profiles page of my
website.
 
The only thing Papajohn didn't say, mainly probably because you didn't ask,
is that if you are worried about loss and have the harddrive space then
capture as DV-AVI instead.
 
Awesome! Thanks PapaJohn and Wojo. I'll play around with both options
(DV-AVI and Custom WMVs), and see what turns out best.
 
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