Blackmagic Intensity Pro Card - Best Use With HDV

Question

Hello
Given the choice should I use my Blackmagic Intensity card on my Mac Pro to capture HDV footage via HDMI or YUV Component. Or should I stick to firewire.
The card was initially bought for realtime previewing whilst editing HDV footage in FCP. My plans are to connect the card to a 21" LCD monitor via HDMI connections.
One of the Panasonic reps told me to stick with YUV as it does not compress the footage during the transfer stage as much as firewire?
Is this true?

Answer 1

With all due respect, your Panny rep was on crack.
Capturing over Firewire — whether it's DV or HDV — is a raw-data-stream copy from the tape. It's not actually a video operation at all; the signal is in no way changed. It's just copied from the tape directly into your computer.
Going out of your camera or deck via the component analog ports will give you lower-quality results than transferring over Firewire. Whether you can tell the difference depends on what kind of footage you're capturing.
Another point to keep in mind is that HDV is 1440x1080 with non-square pixels. Capturing it either via HDMI or component analog scales the footage to 1920x1080, introducing some softness in the image. This softness is even worse in the chroma channels, since HDV is only 4:2:0 to begin with. It's better by far to keep your footage in its native format throughout the editing process. If you're going back out to an HD digital master or to an HD tape, you can decide whether to scale to 1920 at that point. If you're shooting on HDV to deliver on SD DVD or over the Internet at less-than-full HD resolution, you're better off staying in 1440x1080 forever, never scaling up to 1920, and just doing a single down-scale at the end.