Newbie has problem

[Oilseal]

I've recently become interested in this whole DV editing thing. I bought a firewire card with Dazzle software and was very disappointed. I have recently acquired Pinnacle Studio 8. The program has installed with no problems but when I try to capture video I get an error message saying that I dont have my Sony DV camcorder attached (when I do)

Can someone offer advice. With the Dazzle software the camcorder was instantly recognized.

I have a nasty feeling that the card may only work with the Dazzle.


Thanks in advance


Oilseal

[mkelley]

There may be codec conflicts -- before you try and resolve them, though, you should be aware that firewire transfer is just that: a transfer of information (and not a capture). Theoretically (and IMHO, practically) there shouldn't be one iota's bit of difference in how you are transferring the DV file from your camcorder to your computer, in terms of quality.

When you were using Dazzle's software were you transferring the file to DV and not trying to compress at the same time? If so, what was the problem with the DV-AVI file? Or were you just disappointed in Dazzle's software for some other reason? Because you ought to be able to capture with the Dazzle software and use whatever editing software you want.

[Oilseal]

I was really disappointed in the quality of the finished article on a VCD. Perhaps I was expecting too much but the results were inferior to me transferring to VHS tape. As I say it might be my expectation but clarity on a par with VHS would have made me happy. In the first instance I just wanted to get my DV onto CD.

The resolution was around 320x???. Yet when it was capturing the quality looked top class.

Am I being unrealistic.

Greater minds must tell me


Thanks for the answer mKelley



Oilseal

[mkelley]

Well, as I said the "capture" via firewire is really just a file transfer, so the quality should be very good indeed -- it should be the same as what you see when you play back the image in your camcorder.

From that point on it gets to be problematic. If you note the file capture sizes, DV-AVI is fairly huge (around 22megs for two hours) which obviously won't even fit on a DVD, let alone a VCD. So you need to encode your video down using (most likely) MPEG compression, which is a compromise in terms of quality versus file size. MPEG2 (which is used for DVD) is very good indeed, as a viewing of a commercial DVD can tell you. If you use any good MPEG encoder you ought to be able to get similar quality results. My DVDs are every bit as good as the original footable I shot with my DV camcorder.

Since I've never made a VCD I can't tell you what to expect from using MPEG1 compression -- the specs say it's equal to VHS (or so) so that would tell me that it wouldn't look as good as DV but it shouldn't look completely crappy. But a lot might depend on how you are encoding. If I were you I'd take my DV-AVI footage and run it through TMPGEnc (which is a free MPEG1 encoder -- it also will do MPEG2 but only for a 14 day trial, after which it costs money to do that). Then I guess you put it on a VCD somehow (which you already know how to do). If your footage still looks unacceptable to you then you'll need to bite the bullet and make DVDs (it's so cheap nowadays I'm not sure why anyone would want to do anything else, but that's just me).