looking for best way to pull video from mini DV.

[dreadogg]

ok right now im using unlead movie factory2 and the output really sucks, Im using a samsung SCD-23 I know the camcorder is not high grade but I would expect better from a mini-dv cam it looks very pixelated and grayed and fuzzy when displayed through win dvd, please suggest better method! the method Im using seems to easy.

[Tommyknocker]

How are you getting the video from the miniDV?

[dreadogg]

sorry firewire and I am using the capture option in dvd moviefactory. thanks for the quick response

[dreadogg]

also when displayed on my 54 inch projection screen from cam through composite cable it seems alot better than whats displayed on pc after capture.

[Tommyknocker]

Can you PC player deinterlace?

[dreadogg]

I think its just my camcorder I just spent an hour trying to get my pc to recognize the camcorder through firewire because it just disconnected for no reason, now it wont work at all in dv mode, so I ruled out card and cable by using the firewire cable to network my main pc and my laptop together, and had no flaw, the camcorder will not connect to either. So looks like I will be returning it tommarro maybe it had other flaws also. But dont stop recommending me options for great quality rips. later be back tommarro

[tito13kfm]

I use windv for rips from my camcorder.
It's freeware, less than 100K.. that's right K..
and it works perfectly for what I want to do.

If you want fancy indexing, and choosing which scenes to transfer you will have to use Scenalyzer or some other tool, but I like free.

After ripping the video I just edit in VDub, encode with TMPGEnc, author and burn.

[State Of Mind]

I also use WinDV. Plug in your camera to the firewire cable, put on VCR/playback mode, click the capture button in WinDV (Set the Discontinue setting to 0 and max frames to 1000000). Also, make sure you have a DV codec. I use the MainConcept DV Demo Codec v2.1.

[dreadogg]

ok so I used win dv to capture then i used TMPGEnc to encode then I used tmpgenc author to author, only step I missed was vdub but why do you use this anyway? I think the quality is better than unlead but I need to do more testing thanks for all the input keep the recommendations coming.

[Thorn]

In low light, you'll always have grainy video. Some cameras are better, but cameras are never as good as your eyes. I had a lot of trouble with encoding grainy video, because mpeg2 doesn't handle noise very well (even if it looks smooth to your eye, it might not look smooth to the encoder).

If you chain through virtualdub before tmpgenc, you can use some of the filters to clean up the video (like a smoother or temporal smoother). Just be careful not to overdo it.

BTW good move with ditching ulead. Direct-to-mpeg capture is done at the expense of quality, and Ulead never seemed too concerned with quality in the first place.

[dreadogg]

yea my camera = crap because the firewire port not working again it started by leaving a green bar on the right side of captured video, now I get no signal from camera to pc on two different machines using two cables leaving my dv the culprit. Im going to return this cam after the holidays. thanks again for the responses.