I'm almost certain that the HF9G has a nearly pure composite output. I mean that there is probably a digital conversion in the TBC but that it doesn't pass through the comb filter and get recombined on the way out. This coupled with the capture card are the reason I think it gets such a clean picture.

I encoded this with a setting of crf=16 and according to some this is more than enough to capture all of the detail. It is compressed but I think it's at a quality equal to or better than an 8gb DL DVD would be.

EDIT:

Jetrell Fo said:

I figured with the smaller size of the .mkv that maybe it was compressed to make it an easier upload, that's all.

I certainly won't bite the hand that feeds, ya know.

It's no problem and if somebody tells me that it is a bad idea to make a dvd from an x264 file then I'll maybe reconsider doing a DL but my idea is that if the MKV is of high quality then everybody should be able to put this into whatever format they want without much loss even if there has to be a re-encode such as putting it on DVD.