bitrate for Sony TRV38

[evilive1138]

I just bought my first miniDV camcorder, the Sony DCR-TRV38, the other day. I shot a couple of minutes of video around the house just to learn how the camcorder works.

I then transferred the video to my PC via firewire using winDV (type 2). I also installed the PANADV codec as recommended. When I watched the video in WinDVD, it looks very grainy and not up to the quality I would have expected.

I tried recapturing the video from the camcorder using Premiere, but it still looked just as bad. I then tried viewing it by plugging the camera directly into the TV - same thing.

Out of curiosity, I checked the statistics on my avi files. I found that they were 720x480, 29.97 fps. But, the interesting thing is that the average data rate (I assume this is bitrate) is 3.63MB per second, according to Premiere. In researching DV I found references that state that DV bitrate is around 25 MB/sec. Quite a difference, in my opinion.

I also checked a couple of avi's that I captured directly from VHS tape using VirtualDub. They are around 9.6MB/sec on average. I would have assumed that the DV bitrate would be much higher than VHS.

I checked through the settings on my camera, my instruction manual, and various websites, but have not been able to find any information as to why the bitrate is so small or how to improve the picture quality.

Although I've been capturing/converting for a couple of years, I'm very new to DV and camcorders. Can someone tell me if my assumptions about DV bitrate are correct? Also, regardless of the answer to the biterate question, is their anything I can do to improve the quality of video from my camcorder?

Thanks -C

[Baldrick]

DV is 25 MBit/s and that is around 3 MByte/s.

One byte is 8 bits.

[junkmalle]

DV is 25 MBit/s

No!!! DV is 25 Mbit/s -- it's important to use b for bit and B for Byte.

[evilive1138]

Thanks Baldrick. That makes sense.

What kind of quality should I expect from miniDV? I guess I expected it to be a vast improvement in picture quality over analog camcorders, but from what I've seen so far (with my own camera), it doesn't look much better than video on VHS-C.

I'm sure that part of this is a learning curve on my part.

-C

[junkmalle]

Yes, b is bit and B is byte...but Bit is bit.

I know, but I just think it's nice to be consistent. It helps reduce the confusion.

To evilive1138:

I shot a couple of minutes of video around the house... it looks very grainy

You should get near DVD quality out of a DV camcorder. In all likelyhood the lighting wasn't sufficient in the house. Try some footage from outdoors in daylight. Also make sure you weren't shooting with a very high shutter speed (say, a "sports" setting on the camcorder) as this will have the same result.

Note that a firewire capture isn't a capture per se -- it's a file transfer. So whatever you saw on the computer was exactly what's on the tape.