Recording DVD straight to Mini DV

Piff Tannen · Post by **Piff Tannen** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 12:22 pm

is there any way to do this? short of just playing a dvd on a tv and filming it with a mini dv camera?

Andvil · Post by **Andvil** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 12:42 pm

I've had to do this before and there's no way.
your camera has to have a line-in.

I did it with a VCR, and I had to hook the VCR up to my computer, capture video from that, and then export it to MiniDV on the camera.

There's a bit of generational loss, but it's not incredibly drastic.

Piff Tannen · Post by **Piff Tannen** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 12:59 pm

i think i have some sort of line in on there. im gonna check it out tonight. if i can just have an audio line in, ill be ok.

my boys converter only took the video that i needed, but not the audio, so if i can get the audio onto a minidv tape then ill just have to use that, and sync it to the video. sorta sucks.

but word andvil, i thought thered be a straight forward way cos back when i was a kid, we'd make movies and we'd record in shit from movies for effects, like we put in a house exploding at the end of the movie, cos we obviously couldnt make any good effects, being kids and all. shit like that.

Skope · Post by **Skope** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 3:33 pm

Yeah, because of new DVD protection there isn't really an easy way to do it. We had a DVD player with firwire out going into a DV deck and everytime we tried to record with the deck the DVD player sent some sort of signal that made the deck stop. There are work arounds but it depends on what equipment you have. We ran it out of the DVD player into a TBC (time base corrector) and out if of the TBC into the DV Deck, which worked (I think this is how the engineer here did it, can't remember exactly). Chances are you do not have access to a TBC (equipment I have access to at work) so it's probably gonna be a pain in the ass.

I actually have an idea but I have never tried it so i don't know if it'll work.
I have Svideo out of my mac, take that into my camera, line out to line in for audio. If my camera can interpret the signal coming from my Mac it might work, but I can't try till I get home.

Skope · Post by **Skope** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 3:37 pm

I just thought of another problem you will have. You can not get Mini DV tapes longer than 83 minutes. So there will have to be a break somewhere while you switch tapes.

Piff Tannen · Post by **Piff Tannen** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 6:09 pm

oh, this is for my church. i work the cameras during services, and we record straight to dvd. i only need about 20 minutes of video off the dvd=sermon. i wont have to switch tapes. im gonna fuck around with my camera tonight and see if i can figure out a way to do this shit.

i was thinkin about trying to record the dvd to a vhs and trying to record the vhs to the dv cam? sound feasible?

Skope · Post by **Skope** » Thu Jun 23, 2005 2:30 pm

Yeah, going from the DVD player into the VHS Recorder, then out of that into your camera should work, although it will certainly loose quality.