Capture quality from DV?

[weshuang]

I have been capturing directly from DV tape by firewire to Ulead VS 6. I capture fine, with no dropped frames. I've been using TMPG to encode and author.

My problem is that the quality of the resulting DVD is significantly worse than the original DV tape. I have fooled around with very high bitrates and used the highest quality motion search settings, to no avail. Basically, the colors are washed out. I can improve the problems somewhat by using TMPG's contrast filters, but it is still very easy to see the loss in quality.

My question is, is it possible that the problem is in capturing from DV to avi? I read somewhere that VDub with HuffyUV is an ideal capturing setup, but frankly I don't want to start all over learning how to use a new software. I read in a different post that capturing from DV to avi is really not "capturing", but simply transferring a video file.

Is there a way for me to tell at what stage I'm losing quality from the original source, avi or encoding?

[redwudz]

DV from a camcorder is a transfer, no capturing involved. Virtualdub will not transfer a file from the camera to the computer, it will accept a DV file(DV2) after it is on the computer, and then with a DV codec installed. What is the quality of the DV file in the computer? Is it as good of quality as the tape? I'll leave it to someone else to discuss how to get the best quality from DV-DVD; I'm still working on that myself.

[FulciLives]

Hello

There is an option in TMPGEnc called "Output YUV data as Basic YCbCr not CCIR601" and from my reading it would seem that most DV codecs convert best to MPEG-2 when you ENABLE this option in TMPGEnc

The default for this option is disabled (unchecked) so that explains why your conversions are looking overly bright with a lack of color. When you enable (check) this option your video will be darker with richer color and should be a match to the original DV footage.

For more info on TMPGEnc and the various settings this program uses you might want to read the following:

Configuring TMPGEnc for high-quality, DVD-compliant MPEG-2

Good Luck

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[weshuang]

Hello

There is an option in TMPGEnc called "Output YUV data as Basic YCbCr not CCIR601" and from my reading it would seem that most DV codecs convert best to MPEG-2 when you ENABLE this option in TMPGEnc

The default for this option is disabled (unchecked) so that explains why your conversions are looking overly bright with a lack of color. When you enable (check) this option your video will be darker with richer color and should be a match to the original DV footage.

For more info on TMPGEnc and the various settings this program uses you might want to read the following:

Configuring TMPGEnc for high-quality, DVD-compliant MPEG-2

Good Luck

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

That did the trick, John! I can't tell you what a huge amount of frustration you've just resolved! Thanks!

[FulciLives]

That did the trick, John! I can't tell you what a huge amount of frustration you've just resolved! Thanks!

Not a problem!

Hopefully some other people will see this as this is a little known "issue" with using TMPGEnc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman