capturing from dv questions

[cicada]

i am trying to capture from my sony handycam to my computer. I am using a firwire card (IEEE 1394). I have tried a lot of times to capture some video (720/480) but when i encode to mpeg (480/480) i lose a lot of quality and the video gets blocky. I think maybe it is because of the resizing.
Is there anyway to capture 480/480 avi from my handycam so i don't have to resize?
Do you think that there could be another thing causing the problem?
What software do you use for capturing from handycam and convert it to svcd mpg, getting the best quality possible?
Are there any good guides for this?

Thanx

[Tommy]

What program are you using? I only ask because some of them don't compress to mpeg very well. Example, I have a pinnicle studiodv card/program and it does the firewire and editing great however if i try to get an mpeg out of it..... What I do is export out of the program in avi and use tmpg. The resulting mpeg looks great. However, it could also just be your source. If its video from the camcorder it should be fine, if your using the camcorder for a passthough and the original source is crap than yeah the resulting mpeg would be crap reguardless.

[cicada]

i have used studio dv also, i have cinema craft encoder 2.5 sp and i want to use it to encode mpg, but cce can't resize, so i am looking for a program that can capture at 480x480. I have tried vdub but it doesn't work, it doesn't find the camera. Is there any program to resize without losing quality?

[holistic]

NOTE : v-dub will not work with DV codecs
http://www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_faq#dvmpeghang

[Patric]

Have you tried MovieDV4 from aist? You can find it under http://www.aist.com.

I use it and I capture with it from my Panasonic camcorder. However, I always capture in DV quality (why else since that is the reason I bought the DV cam) and therefore I have never tried to capture in that quality. But I believe it works as you can define the capture quality in the settings.

Anyway, I capture in DV quality, modify the footage in MovieDV4, then render the new movie with the DV Encoder as DV. Then I use TMPGE to convert the DV into SVCD or VCD. Works perfect. The quality is outstanding!

My tip for you, keep capturing in DV and then use TMPGE to convert the stream into any other format.

Cheers

Pat