What do these decks do?

[Aviv Hallale]

At school, in our first year, we work on Mini-DV tape...When editing, we use an adapter to run the tape into a DVCPRO Deck that's hooked up to a client monitor of sorts, but is part of the deck package...That is then connected to the workstation's Black Magic Capture Cards, the deck is connected with component cables. Our old editing lecturer mentioned something about these decks uncompressing the DV footage and making it analogue while the capture card makes it digitial again at a much higher resolution...Could someone maybe explain this to me in better terms? The quality IS incredible though.

[Glenn Chan]

Our old editing lecturer mentioned something about these decks uncompressing the DV footage and making it analogue while the capture card makes it digitial again at a much higher resolution...Could someone maybe explain this to me in better terms? The quality IS incredible though.

He could be wrong... everyone is wrong from time to time. Heck, what I just said could be wrong. ;)

As far as the quality goes, it should probably go down since you're getting generation loss from digital --> analog --> digital. And if your editing systems need to compress your footage, then you're getting more loss from that compression.

However, color resolution may sort of go up. The deck will apply chroma interpolation when it decodes the DV (DVCPRO is just like DV, except on different tape). Most DV decompressors in editing applications don't do that.
Like upscaling in Photoshop, using bicubic instead of nearest neighbour.

Another possibility is that the deck or the capture card performs aperture correction or something like that... this is like turning up sharpness on a TV. This sort of gives you higher resolution.

The best quality really would be to transfer over firewire/ieee1394, as this is a LOSSLESS transfer. This is even better than SDI transfer (digital). SDI transfer may have workflow advantages.