Way to convert .dv files into .mov on Big Sur (or later) OS and retain quality?

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Way to convert .dv files into .mov on Big Sur (or later) OS and retain quality?

I have a huge number of archived .dv files imported from Digital8 tapes via an older version of iMovie. As .dv files are considered obsolete I need them in a different format, but I also want to maintain the original quality if at all possible. Due to size constraints converting them all to uncompressed SD format using Compressor isn't really feasible. As QuickTime does support DV format in .mov files I'm thinking converting to that format would retain the original quality (still in DV) but in a way that's still supported. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and this would still require reencoding with associated quality loss.)

Ancient posts on the Apple Communities indicate that the MPEG Streamclip program was capable of converting .dv files into .mov files, but that's a 32-bit legacy program that won't run on recent Mac OS versions. Are there other programs out there that can do the conversion? Compressor and QuickTime (at least current versions of them) don't.

I do have an older Mac that I could install MPEG Streamclip on, but it would be much slower than my current machine. Does anyone here understand video formats and containers well enough to tell me if using MPEG Streamclip in this fashion would losslessly package up the DV format video in a .mov container or not? If it's going to be lossy anyway then I might as well use a more modern format instead.

(BTW, the tapes were imported using iMovie as Digital8 camcorders apparently used an oddball audio sampling rate that Final Cut Pro couldn't handle; importing the video using FCP resulted in audio that moved out-of-sync in random ways that's difficult/impossible to fix. iMovie understood the sampling rate and so there were no audio sync issues.)

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Feb 8, 2022 6:58 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

James Brickley

Level 5

4,918 points

Feb 8, 2022 8:54 PM in response to Andre Molyneux

Well unless you are dealing with remarkably high-quality video in the DV files, which is unlikely. I would try using Handbrake first. Selecting an output format at varying levels of quality. That can net you h.264 / h.265 in a compatible format that will be very well supported by most anything. Try a few of the files and see what the results are like. You can also select the Production Max preset which is uncompressed and would give you the maximum quality but absolutely gigantic file sizes. I am sure that FCP could then handle the resulting output MP4 file container.

The other advantage is the batch processing that Handbrake can handle.

https://handbrake.fr

Another option FFMPEG command line tool. However that is going to require a lot more trial and error to work through the many options.

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Answer 2

Feb 8, 2022 10:42 PM in response to Andre Molyneux

Years ago I converted all my archived .dv from iMovie 1-6 to deinterlaced H.264 .mp4 with MPEG Streamclip with its preset "Export to MPEG-4... > iTunes... > Apple TV 4:3 (SD) > (scaled and cropped to 768x576, Limit Data Rate: 5Mbps, MPEG-4 AAC 256 kbps)" with Deinterlace as 25fps (PAL). NTSC needs somewhat different options.

Recently I did it again but this time in Big Sur with ffmpeg (I installed it with MacPorts but Homebrew should be OK, too) to H.265 .mp4 and also used "bob" deinterlacing which preserves all fields and doubles the PAL frame rate from 25 to 50 fps. I did some tests to figure out the best settings for PAL input. The quality is somewhat better than with about the same file size.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162813?answerId=254106601022#254106601022

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Answer 3

Feb 9, 2022 11:22 AM in response to James Brickley

Thanks for the suggestions. I experimented a bit with Handbrake and was able to output both H264 and H265 files that don’t seem to lose much (if anything) in the way of quality. I tried the same thing with Compressor and found its presets to be too aggressive on compression, resulting in significantly smaller files but with obvious degradation. I’ll have to continue to experiment with settings to figure out what’s a good compromise to me.

One disadvantage with these conversions is they also convert from interlaced to progressive, which will have an impact if I later want to run some of the clips through Topaz Video Enhance to upscale them. Topaz does a much better job of deinterlacing in my experience, but is far too slow to run everything in my archive through.

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Answer 4

Feb 9, 2022 12:01 PM in response to Andre Molyneux

Old interlaced .dv with comb lines look awful on progressive computer monitors so it must be deinterlaced (although some footage with long shutter speed is effectively progressive and does need deinterlacing). My ffmpeg project with "bob" deinterlacing was triggered by a test how well all interlaced fields could be preserved with smoother motion when usual deinterlacing throws 50% of video material away.

Rectangular DV pixels are also usually converted to square pixels. For example 4:3 PAL 720x576 either a) scaled to 788x576 and cropped to 768x576 or b) cropped to 702x576 and scaled to 768x576 (16:9 has its own figures). NTSC conversion calculations are even weirder.

I keep all archived .dv clips as master files in case someone wants to re-edit them. Final Cut Pro seems to do an OK job in deinterlacing when I briefly tested it. Compressor's default settings were inferior to ffmpeg but I did not try to fine-tune it. My .dv clips are already carefully edited in old iMovie 1-6 so I have at least not yet re-edited any of them. Editing new footage keeps me busy enough.

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Answer 5

Feb 9, 2022 3:47 PM in response to James Brickley

For my original intent (just getting the .dv files into .mov containers) ffmpeg appears to be the answer. The invocation:

ffmpeg -I <input_file>.dv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -f mov <output_file>.mov

does the trick and executes so quickly that I'm fairly confident no reencoding is going on. The file sizes do grow a bit (presumably something to do with the container) but QuickTime shows the video format as "DV/DVCPRO - NTSC" and to my eyes the frames look absolutely identical between the .dv original and the .mov copy. Also, FCP X and Topaz Video Enhance AI both ingest the .mov version of the file without complaint.

Before determining this I also tried installing MPEG Streamclip on my old Mac, and in that case it's reencoding so that wasn't the answer. It's also tremendously slow.

Now I just need to write a script around ffmpeg to convert all of the .dv files in a directory and I'll be set.

Note that Handbrake using GPU acceleration quickly converts to H264 or H265, and is likely the route I'd go down if I wasn't expecting to use Topaz Video Enhance AI to upscale and deinterlace some subset of the clips in the future.

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Way to convert .dv files into .mov on Big Sur (or later) OS and retain quality?

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