New Sony DCRHC20 video quality

[pjanzk]

Just bought a new Sony DCRHC20 MiniDV. First digital video I own. Problem is when I transfer to PC video looks fuzzy. Square kinda pixels.
I have a Emachines T2542 Celeron 2.5GHZ 120GB HD 1GB memory XP. I transferred the video using a generic firewire 1394a card(BestPorts?).
When I view the video on the LCD it looks fine. Viewed on the TV looks fine. When viewed in premier in the small vindow it looks fine. When I play back after capturing in premiere looks fuzzy. When I play the captured avi file in windows movie player looks ok in small window but not full screen. I have analog tapes that look better. I am using the default settings in premiere, (settings viewer - capture - dv/ieee, compressor, microsoft DV(NTSC) - project capture microsoft DV AVI - export capture microsoft AVI compressor cinepak codec by radius. Have an intel extreme graphics card 845GV. I tried a couple things I read in posts. I used dvio, installed pvdcodec. I tried on my 2000 machine usning ATI all in wonder card. Tried best quality MPEG2 and the captured video ran too fast. The best quality I got was at quarter Mpeg quality. That is what I used for my analog tapes. I thought I should get a better quality capture from DV? When capturing in premiere in the project setting window I tried to select video for windows but it says it can not connect to capture driver. Maybe I don't have something installed correctly? Maybe I am just expecting too much? I've been looking through posts for the last 3 days. Sent Sony support email - useless.
Thanks for any help.

[Will Hay]

Sorry, I may have missed it but have you encoded to mpeg2 yet?
You have it as DV on your PC and if you haven't encoded or burnt to a DVDr you may simply be experiencing interlacing.
Suggest you encode to mpeg2 with the trial of TMPGEnc Plus at 720 x whatever (576 for me, PAL) at 8000CBR and then author to a DVD.
Then see how it looks on your standalone DVD player.

Will


EDIT: Hang on, you're not 'capturing' from your camcorder on the fly to mpeg2 are you?

[Tommyknocker]

I think it may be your camera. Can you borrow a friend's DV camera and transfer DV to your sys tem with it?

[pjanzk]

I changed the CBR to 8000 and created and mpg2. I then created a DVD with both the original AVI and the new mpg2 files. When I play them on my DVD they both look good.

I can't understand why it doesn't look good on the computer?

[Will Hay]

...and if you haven't encoded or burnt to a DVDr you may simply be experiencing interlacing.

...and if you haven't encoded or burnt to a DVDr you may simply be experiencing interlacing.
Look up interlacing the glossary.

Will Hay

[pjanzk]

Read about interlacing on 100fps.com. I tried to use tmpgenc, encode as non-interlaced. Didn't work. Still blurry but only when I play in full screen. When the video is small it looks fine. I had a friend bring over their DV camera with the same results. So it's not the camera. Tried a whole bunch of different settings in tmpgenc. I can make the video worse but not better. The video doesn't look as bad as some of the other pictures I saw in the other forums here. I will try and do a screen capture of the small movie and large movie if would give you a better idea of what I am seeing?