Whenever possible, use DV source media. These can be captured from DV cameras and decks with no loss in quality.

You can convert analog source video to DV using a media converter.

Set your project properties to match your desired output format.

This will give you a true view of the final output if you use an external monitor for previewing, and will prevent unnecessary stretching or field order inconsistencies.

If you want to use an existing DV source file to set your project settings, click the Match Media Settings button on the Video tab of the Project Properties dialog and browse to a file.

When prerendering or rendering your project, use the default DV template that matches your project settings. Playback performance will be optimized, and you will avoid needless recompression of DV footage.

Recompression occurs only when necessary. Raw DV sequences without transitions and effects will not be recompressed when you output the project to DV from the timeline or from a DV file in Video Capture.

If you are printing to tape from the timeline, use the default DV template that matches your project settings. If you use an uncompressed or custom template, you will create a file that will not print properly.

When you print to DV tape from the timeline, you can generate a test tone to accompany the test pattern. Note that this tone is fixed at -20dB. If you need a different tone level to match your audio mix, you can create a custom test pattern and tone clip that is calibrated to your hardware.

The DV format allows color values to exceed broadcast NTSC and PAL color level standards. To ensure that your video levels stay within legal broadcast levels, you can use the Extremely Conservative preset in the Broadcast Colors filter to specific events or to the entire project.

This filter does result in recompression of the video, so expect render times to increase significantly if the filter is applied to the entire project.

With the Sony DV codec and the smooth clamping capability of the Broadcast Colors filter, you will not significantly degrade your picture quality. The only noticeable difference typically occurs in the pure white portions of the video, which will be smoothly clamped to legal broadcast levels.