At what stage is DV lossy?

[lilhobo]

is the encoding from the camera lossy? so that as the miniDV tape degrades so does the image quality?

or is the transfer thru wirefire the lossy stage thanks??

ty :D

[LocalH]

The encoding in the camera is where the lossy compression takes place. You probably don't have to worry about tape dropout too much unless you treat your tapes badly, but yes, as with any tape format, as the tape degrades the signal goes with it.

[lilhobo]

if DV is digital as in zeros and ones....why does it matter if the tape degrades???

the light signal is converted to zeros and ones and tape degardation shouldnt matter?

thanks for help in advance :D

[LocalH]

To a point, it doesn't matter, since DV is a fairly robust format. However, if the tape degrades too far, then the 0s and 1s can be damaged, and if there is too much damage then there will be image degradation.

[bb]

Bad tapes result in so-called "dropouts" - funny-coloured blocks that show up once in a while, but the worse the tape's condition, the bigger the problems. In the worst case you can't read the tape anymore, losing all the footage on it.

The degradation effect is not the same as for analogue video tapes, though. There the picture gets gradually worse, less sharp, more noise.

bb