I have about 40 hours of video of monkeys recorded onto 40 miniDV tapes by a Sony TRV70 and some other camcorders, all in miniDV format.
From these 40 tapes, a major TV Channel wants to review and potentialy buy the best 60 minutes in the ORIGINAL miniDV format and quality. I prefer not to give out all 40 tapes to them, but rather simply pick up the best scenes and cut-and-paste them together myself, again, while maintaing the original miniDV quality.
I have the camcorder, a PC with top specs, Sony ImageMixer, Windows Movie Maker, and Adboe Premiere 6.5 up and running.
With these in hand can I, and if so, how, perform such basic editing? Any of these programs capable of maintaining and re-recording miniDV quality? When importing in ImageMixer, I get 360x240 instead of the double expected in NTSC. What specs and parameters I have to preset or watch while doing the capturing, editing and re-recording?
I do NOT want to alter sounds, add any effects/titles, or re-record onto DVD or other general consumer tasks -- just make the best 60 minutes onto a single miniDV without any loss in quality.
Premier can capture DV AVI from the camcorder I think (you may need a capture card this way though). Also you can just stream the video via USB or firewire to your PC. Just capture scenes you want, merge them all together and then output back to camcorder to record on miniDV tape. You could capture all 40 tapes and then make a compilation but you would need a huge HD.
If the only thing you want to do is capture the video, cut and paste scenes and stream it back to tape, you can do that all with Moviemaker. Just make sure that you use Firewire to retain original quality.
