HDR-SR5 Camcorder and MPEG transport stream

[raysolomon]

I have been doing videography with my NEW Sony HDR-SR5 camcorder in a professional studio for green screen/chroma keying.
The camcorder has an HDMI output that I connect to my wide screen monitor via a HDMI to DVI cable so I can preview the live feed.
On the camcorder I use manual focus and other settings are also manual so I can make sure a particular setup always look good.
I also set the video quality to the highest setting which makes the output resolution 1440x1080 pixels.
(The resolution needs to be big so I can chroma key it better)

When I press Record, it renders the video to the internal hard drive in MTS (AVCHD) format.
This appears to be an MPEG transport stream that utilizes MPEG2 compression to help save hard drive space.

After all my test shoots, I download an MTS file from the camcorder using a USB cable and import it into Sony Vegas 8c.

When I preview the video in Vegas at full(best quality) resolution, the subject(person) in the video is slightly fuzzy and slightly unfocused. (But the live output on my monitor is not).

Questions:

* Is the MPEG2 compression making my video slightly fuzzy and unfocused?

* Can I get better quality by outputting the raw video feed directly from the camcorder to the computer using a Component video cable and a capture card? If so, what video capture card would you recommend?
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-VMC-30VC-Component-Terminals-Camcorders/dp/B0007XYIVC

* Or would I get better quality by outputting the raw video feed directly from the camcorder to the computer using an HDMI cable and HDMI capture card?
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

[zoobie]

try using firewire and see what happens

[raysolomon]

The camcorder does not support firewire.

The usb is for transferring the files from the camcorder's hard drive.

[Soopafresh]

That camera uses AVCHD format, so it's not MPEG2. AVCHD is a flavor of h264.

Explain what you mean by "fuzzy". Can you take a screen capture and post it here?

* Can I get better quality by outputting the raw video feed directly from the camcorder to the computer using a Component video cable and a capture card? If so, what video capture card would you recommend?
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-VMC-30VC-Component-Terminals-Camcorders/dp/B0007XYIVC

No

* Or would I get better quality by outputting the raw video feed directly from the camcorder to the computer using an HDMI cable and HDMI capture card?
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

Yes, but the hard disk speed requirements on your computer make it very impractical to do so. You'd need 3 hard drives running in RAID 0 to be fast enough to capture the uncompressed video coming from the camera.



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