What relationship does DV have with the popular DVD discs?
[11 June 1998] None, really. DV is designed as an acquisition format – its reason for existance is for you to take pictures using it. You’ll almost always copy a DV tape to VHS or some other format when you want to distribute it to others. DVD is the opposite – it’s a distribution format. You use an acquisition format, such as film or DV, to make your videos, and then you transfer them to DVD. Because of the complexity of the compression system involved, this takes a long time; unlike DV tapes, you cannot simply acquire DVD in real time. Thus, there will never be DVD cameras. DVD uses the MPEG-2 compression system, which is similar to the popular JPG format – you can do moderate compression and have a perfect image, or you can do a large amount of compression and have a barely viewable one. The main difference between this and the compression scheme used for DV tape is that the DV tape scheme is simpler and compresses a great deal less.
