"John" wrote in message
...
I'm very new to all this and I can't find an FAQ for this group so I
apologise if this question has been asked before. I've just bought a Sony
HC22E MiniDV camcorder and I'll be using a Firewire cable to connect the
DV
output of the camcorder to the DV input of my stand-alone DVD recorder so
that I can put my movies onto DVD.

My DVD recorder (a Philips DVDR725H) will allow me to record in various
qualities - M1 which is the highest quality and allows up to 1 hour of
recording on a standard disc, down to the lowest quality - M8 - which
allows
up to 8 hours on a disc. I've been led to believe that M4 is better than
the
quality of VHS and M3 roughly equates to S-VHS so on that scale, what
quality is MiniDV and what should I set the recording quality of the DVD
recorder to?

As a general rule, if you're planning to put your DVDs out into the wide
world, you should keep the bitrate as low as quality will allow, as that
will result in best compatibility. Recording at "M1" will yield a DVDR at
the highest bitrate that's allowed for DVDs, but such a high bitrate can
cause problems on many older players, and even some new ones.

Your source is DV material, which has already been compressed somewhat, so
you'll see compression artefacts anyway. It very much depends on the nature
of the footage, but a ballpark figure of 6 to 6.5 mbps is a good enough DVD
bitrate for DV-sourced material. If you drop much below 5 you will start to
see artefacts from the recompression (don't get me wrong - recompression
always introduces some artefacts - it's just that this is the level below
which they become noticeable).

Your M2 setting is the equivalent of 5mbps, so you're on the "cusp" - If you
have a lot of tripod shots with little action on them (e.g. wedding, school
play) you'll probably be OK. If you've got lots of motion, especially
"random" motion such as confetti, waterfalls, snow/rain and trees blowing in
the wind, you'll start to see artefacts.

Ideally, you could do with something halfway between M1 and M2. DVD media is
cheap - try recording some DV footage using M1 and M2 compression, and see
if you can tell the difference between them during playback. If you're up
for the experiment, try the same footage at M3, M4, M6 and M8 too and see at
what level you notice the drop in quality.

Such an experiment will cost £1.20 because you can get super-cheapo discs
for evaluating the recorder. When it comes to day-to-day usage, don't use
quite such cheap discs.