dv capture problem

[Ian Livingstone]

Hi folks - having problems capturing from my Sony PC120E camcorder into Premier6.

Everything appears fine - the preview looks great (albeit a small screen), no dropped frames. I'm capturing at 720x576 pal 25fps.

When I play back the captured avi in media player it looks terrible - low frame rate and very poor resolution. A few searches on this forum suggests that this could just be the way media player plays it and it could be OK, so I burn it to DVD using Nero6 (with the supplied mp2 encoding) and the DVD looks the same as it did in media player.

DV out is selected on the PC120E. I've tried other modes of capture, have tried Windows XP's Movie Maker, and also the bundled MGI videowave, and there's no change.

Anything obvious I'm doing wrong?

TIA,

Ian

[Richard_G]

Are you using Firewire (i-Link) to capture or are you trying to use USB? I'm not sure if your camera has both but that is often the problem. The USB port on some camcorders is only intended for transfer of stills or webcam type use Firewire is needed for decent video.

[Sugar]

Ian,

Premiere should capture fine with the Firewire. I do the same with my PC105E and Premiere 6.5. The results do not look good on the Media Player.
Your problem may come from the compression. I have not tried Nero 6, so I do not know how you adjust the settings. Personnally, I stick to TMPGENc, which provides a pretty good control of the compression process. I burn the authored menu with Nero 5.5. Results look very good on either a PAL TV or my NTSC TV through the my Malata player.
Can you give your compression settings?

[Ian Livingstone]

Thanks for the replies:-

Richard - yes I'm using firewire.

Sugar - I should have said it's Nerovision Express2 (part of the Nero6 suite) - and it doesn't really give many compression options.

I'm using the default "quality setting - Standard Play", Bitrate (which I can't alter) = 5073 kb/s.

I think you could be right that Nero is screwing it up with some cr*ppy mpg2 encoding - it's just that the resultant picture on DVDR looks so similar to the picture I'm seeing on Mediaplayer from the uncompressed AVI that I assumed the capture was the fault not the compression.

So can I safely assume that if I capture uncompressed DV with firewire it is a clone of the original? I can only capture at 25fps - is this the same as the original or has it reduced the frame count? One of the apps I tried capturing with (MGI videowave I think) gave me a full screen preview while capturing, and that looked perfect, so I know it's not Garbage In.

I will give TMPGENc a try - can the freeware version do what I want (ie just encode to mp2 - I've already purchased Nero6 to do the menus) or will I have to purchase the full version?

Cheers,
Ian

[Sugar]

Yes, the trial version of TMPGEnc will allow you to encode in MPEG2. I recommend using the directions from this site. I have followed it with success. http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html
Just remember that once you install the trial version, it is to my knowledge not possible to remove the timer which means that once the free trial period as elapsed, the only way to re-use the software is to buy the key.

For your info, I also started by using MGIWave and the result on the screen was good.

The other area of potential problem with the video output is the codec. Do you use the Microsoft DV codec when capturing?

As far as fps is concerned, 25fps, as you probably know, is the standard for PAL video. The compression does not alter this unless you try to convert a PAL video in NTSC or vice versa. Beware the resulting glitches. But I suspect that this is not your problem.

Good luck.

[BJ_M]

first DV is not uncompressed avi and you are not captureing dv - but transfering it from one media to another -- the compression is done in the camera and if you use firewire , you are just copying the digital data from the camera to your hard drive ...


second -- premiere 6.0 had some SERIOUS issues with DV , this was mostly corrected in premiere 6.5 ...


but any other dv transfer app (even movie maker is fine) is ok ..

IF you have a problem with the dv coming from your camera - it is a camera issue or capture (transfer) issue with dropped frames or corrupted transfer --

can you preview the output of your camera on your pc and does it look ok there ?

if so -- also check check with graph edit what on your system is decoding the dv file for viewing or for recompression to another compression type ..

the ms codec is OK for DECODING ... it may be that another decoder decompressor codec is decoding your dv file making it look like stink -- which whould also certainly effect the re-encoding to mpg ...

make sure in your mpeg encoding settings you have bottom field first selected and interlaced source ..

[Sugar]

BJ_M,

I never experienced any capture problem when I was using Premiere 6.0. My camcorder is pretty much the same as Ian's except for the blue tooth connectivity and browsing functions...
The captured files look good with some softwares (MGI, Premiere) but suck with others (Media Player). Nevertheless, after conversion with TMPGEnc, they look very good on TV.
I am curious to see if Ian's new DVD look better after converting with TMPGEnc.

[Ian Livingstone]

thanks for the replies - I haven't tried TMPGEnc yet - will have more time tomorrow, but as a further test I've just tried exporting out a section of the DV from Premier to an uncompressed avi and played that from media player and it still looks very poor. Also tried DIVX5 compression and that looked bad too.

So - I'm totally confused now - surely a DV converted to an uncompressed avi should play fine in media player?
I know the camera's recorded this fine as it plays great connected directly to my 32" tv.

Ian

[BJ_M]

totally uncompressed avi's sometimes have problems in media player also if your hard drive can't keep up .. as for premiere 6 and dv .. there is a lot of info (not all good) at the adobe forums ...

some may have no issues -- but a LOT of people did --

both premiere 6 and 6.5 used the MS codec for dv recompression -- and it is really poor ..

as you have said -- you used other apps and had the same problems -- only way to know whats going on is to preview the dv on your system before transfer (like what you can do properly w/ vegas) toi make sure its not a camera issue and also use graph edit and see what codecs are in use ..