Capture or Encoding?

[jman]

Im wasn't sure where to post this but here it goes.

I just upgraded to a digital 8 sony camcorder (trv-240) and got rid of my Hi8. I was under the assumption that when I captured from a DV source that the quality loss would be zero. Well when I capture through my D-link firewire card with Vegas Video or Studio 7, then encode a MPEG-2 with TMPGEnc for SVCD and burn with NERO 5.5.9 and play the CD in my apex-1500 all of the images get blocky when there is lots of motion. I have searched the forums and found some people with similar probs, and tried different things with TMPGEnc like, high motion search,different Birates, swapping the fields, non-interlacing,and so on. So is there any way that this problem could be happenig at the capture and not encoding? The quality is pretty good except for high motion areas. I have invested quite a bit of money in my camera, hardware, software and time and would love to see this work well. I have lots of projects I would like to edit and share with others ..... Oh when I play the captured AVI video in windows media player its hard to tell if I am getting that high motion effect on my moniter.

I am using---
HP 7850 computer with
Pentium 3 - 933Mhz - 256meg ram - 32meg PNY video card - digital research CDRW - D-link firewire

Vegas Video - Studio 7 - TMPGEnc - NERO 5.5.9 -


Apex-1500 - 32" hitachi tv


PLEASE HELP IN ANY WAY POSSIBLE!!!! Thank you.

[snowmoon]

Some tips...

First off the captured .avi should be identicle to the source, you can check that ( don't worry about interlacing since your monitor is progressive, it will look fine on your TV ). If this is not the case start at your capture software and try and find out what's happeneing.

Encoding is probably where the blocks are getting introduced. If you post more about the template/setting you are using that might help. You could also try one of the other encoders out there. CCE does a great job with clean interlaced source, mainconcepts new encoder can hold it's own and precoder is shaping up to be fairly nice. You can get a demo for mainconcept, but the others are fairly pricey. bbMPEG is a freeware mpeg2 encoder. Really nice quality but I've seen glaciers move faster. If you are really adventerous there is mpeg2enc ( good luck finding a binary for windows outside of VCDeasy ) that can do SVCD encoding as well.

If you have not done so already you should calibrate your TV. An uncalibrated TV can often show harsh MPEG artifacts because of sharpnes being set to high, or really bad white/black level settings.

SVCD is part art, every setup is diffrent, and it takes quite a bit of tweaking and time.

[jman]

First off the captured .avi should be identicle to the source, you can check that

How do i check that? What do you mean identicle?

[snowmoon]

play the video on the camcorder.

play the .avi they should be the same, no degridation apparent ANYWHERE. Motion or no motion.

[jman]

I think the .AVI when played in media player does show some bluriness in the high motion areas. What could be causing this to happen on capture? Could it be interference from other hardware or something?

[snowmoon]

Bluring not seen on the camcorder?

1/60th of a second per field fast action will sometimes blur some ( running, panning, waving, ... ).

[jman]

Not as bad as in seems to be in media player