miniDV to miniDV Copying - is it lossless?

[Peter]

jimslip wrote:

> Yes I agree about it being lossless in terns of Bit to bit, but
> I wonder if the analogue devices are able to introduce noise in
> between the binary information. This is some years ago, but I'd
> swear the more you copied, the worse the copies got even in
> Firewire. Obviously these days we copy hard disc to hard disc
> and there is never any apparent loss.


Well if it's analogue somewhere in the process, you'd be introducing a conversion at that point, (digital-analogue-digital) so that's where the quality drop would occur. At least as I understand it.

[sparky]

milton wrote:

>
> Also, from firewire to hdd then back to firewire is also
> lossless provided that there is no editing/rendering in
> between.
>
>

Yes, assuming no HDD errors, the data transfer to/from HDD is lossless.

However as I understand I can't simply connect a HDD in an enclosure with a firewire port to my miniDV cam and record. Rather the transfer has to be done via a computer and software to create a file in a format that can be saved. Hence even if unlike DVD/MPEG2 etc there is no compression and why Peter generates a data volume of 13GB / hour there is some signal processing introducing losses / picture noise.

[jimslip]

Peter said:

"Well if it's analogue somewhere in the process, you'd be introducing a conversion at that point, (digital-analogue-digital) so that's where the quality drop would occur. At least as I understand it."

Yes that's what I would have thought.