Woohoo I successfully captured. Can I improve the quality?

[gvvb]

Environment: Sony DCR-PC9 DV camcorder, Win XP, capture via firewire with Windows Movie Maker. I doesn't get any easier than this, which scares me. Too good to be true.

My questions:
1. I hear about dropped frames all the time. Which tool do I use to determine my dropped frames? Or in my case, it is essentially a file transfer operation, therefore dropped frames doesn't apply here.

2. Quality is of the essence for me. Can I improve the captured video by using another method or tool? I am a little wary of the tools that MS bundled with their OS, no faith in those scale down version.

Your input is very much appreciated.

[Richard_G]

No need to worry about dropped frames using Firewire, you need a really crappy system to achieve that! Dropped frames was a big problem with analogue capture, slow processors and slow hard disks. A 640 x 480 uncompressed analogue capture ran out at about 30 Mb per second sustained data rate and it wasn't until UDMA 66 that performance like that became even remotely possible. Now that computer systems have got much faster and more reliable, along comes DV which only needs 3.6 Mb per second so life is much simpler. It also means that even a mediocre spec computer is capable of reliable video capture.

Windows Movie Maker only allows low quality captures (320 x 240 at best). Ideally you want to be capturing full frame (720 x 480 if NTSC, 720 x 576 if PAL), which equates to DVD quality but compressed with the DV avi compressor instead of mpeg 2.

Many people use VirtualDub and have no problems. I used to use it for analogue captures but have used the Capture module of Ulead MediaStudio Pro since going over to DV. The difference is that VirtualDub is free, Ulead want quite a lot of money for their software. For a freebie, VirtualDub works extremely well, but as someone else has said many a time, you get what you pay for (which is why Windows Movie Maker is to video editing what Paint is to graphics software).

[MrKGB]

AFAIK:
1. Windows movie maker which comes with xp allows to capture at 720x480.
2. vdub doesn't capture from firewire.
3. free tool for capture from firewire is dvio:
http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm

[kkrull]

I disagree on the dropped frames. I have a very high quality system, several in fact, and they all drop a frame now and again. If you want a perfect capture you need a product like ScenalyzerLive which will notify you of dropped frames.

If anyone knows of a better product I would like to hear, especially if it would, unattended, backup when it dropped a frame and append the dropped frame and continue transferring.

[jennyandgreg]

You drop frames with DV capture via firewire? You must be talking about analog.