Video Quality

[Peter Howells]

First let me give you the specs on my setup. I have a Dell Pentium 4 , 1.80 GHz, with 128MB RAM , running Win XP with a Soundmax Intergrated Digital Audio card. I have an Office Essentials IEEE 1394 PCI Card, and my camera is a JVC GR-DV500U. Software consists of Ulead Video Studio 5, Image Mixer V1.1, MovieWow, Virtual Dub, and the complimentary Windows MovieMaker.

My video quality still seems quite poor and is not much of an improvement over my old analog camera. (dissapointed) I thought that by going to DV it would be much better. Any tips, recommendations, etc from those in the know. Would be appreciated.
Peter

[MrMungus]

First let me give you the specs on my setup. I have a Dell Pentium 4 , 1.80 GHz, with 128MB RAM , running Win XP with a Soundmax Intergrated Digital Audio card. I have an Office Essentials IEEE 1394 PCI Card, and my camera is a JVC GR-DV500U. Software consists of Ulead Video Studio 5, Image Mixer V1.1, MovieWow, Virtual Dub, and the complimentary Windows MovieMaker.

My video quality still seems quite poor and is not much of an improvement over my old analog camera. (dissapointed) I thought that by going to DV it would be much better. Any tips, recommendations, etc from those in the know. Would be appreciated.
Peter

If the input is Firewire and if the video you produced looks worse than the video source, then the only problem could be the settings you're using to produce the final video. What are your settings? What format are you outputting to?

[Peter Howells]

mrmungus, being new to this I'm not sure of my settings or even where to find them. I just tried capturing some video using WinDV, set at avi II and the video quality was much better!

[MrMungus]

mrmungus, being new to this I'm not sure of my settings or even where to find them. I just tried capturing some video using WinDV, set at avi II and the video quality was much better!

Well, it sounds like you haven't created any files from the captured video yet. Just remember that when you do the video capture from your camcorder that there will be interlacing in the video which might make the video look worse. That's normal and won't be visible if you burn the video to DVD and play it on a TV. If you're planning on capturing then converting to a computer/web video format (a format you're intending to play primarily on your computer), make sure you deinterlace the video (to remove those lines). Check out the Guides to the left.