Capture Quality

[apax]

Hello,

Need some advice please...

Im using a Dazzle digital video creator 150 to import my home movies from my digital video camera.

The software im using is pinnacle studio....

After import the videos look darker and not as clear....If I use windows media player and ajust brightness it looks much better...

Is it the software im using to import or a combination of hardware and software causing the problems...???

Can someone recommend good software to edit the videos after I import them? Perhaps a I can edit the the movies to make them a bit better

any suggestions welcome

thanks much

[edDV]

OK this gets a bit technical but it's important if you want quality video to a DVD.

First, if you have a DV digital camcorder you should be using IEEE-1394 to transfer the video to the computer. The quality will be much better.

Second, if you intend this video to go to a DVD that will be played on a TV, you shouldn't judge the video quality from the computer RGB monitor for several technical reasons.

- computer monitors are RGB where TV, DV and DVD use a form of Y, R-Y, B-Y color space (aka YUV, Y,Pr,Pb or Y,Cr,Cb)

- computer monitors use linear gamma, a TV has nonlinear gamma.

- computer displays use 0 for black and 255 for white (8 bit) where DV and DVD use 16 for black and 235 for white for luminance (Y) and different scalings for color.

- capture from NTSC sources may include 7 IRE setup (black level) that needs to be mapped to level 16 lunimance for proper TV display.

- and the biggie, computer monitors are displayed progressive where TV, DV and DVD use interlace fields*. This causes split field motion tearing to be visible on computer monitors**.

All of this combines to make a proper TV capture look dark, non-linear and jaggie (motion tearing) on a computer monitor. Any adjustments you do to the actual video file to make it look good on the computer monitor will impare the TV display quality.

If you use DV transfer over IEEE-1394, the best way to monitor the picture for quality is with a properly calibrated TV monitor connected to the camcorder.

Prosumer level editing programs support realtime monitoring of the video signal on the IEEE-1394 out. For consumer editing programs, you often need to do a test render to DV format and play that back through the camcorder to see what you are doing. It's also a good idea to do a test DVD MPeg2 render (sample scenes) to a DVD-RW so you can see what it looks like on the TV connected to the DVD player.

Choice of a "good editing program" depends on what you are trying to do, the money you are willing to spend and the effort you want to put into a quality result.

* DVD stores video information as interlace even if both fields of data are present. For progressive TV display, the DVD player will do the interlace to progressive conversion.

**Good video playback software for computers like Cyberlink's Power DVD will deinterlace the video and adjust levels for a better computer display but this shouldn't be considered a quality reference for what you will see on a TV.

[edDV]

I see that the Dazzle 150 encodes the S-video directly to MPeg2 in hardware. With that approach you will be editing the video in MPeg2 and then reencoding after you author the DVD menus.

To see what your video is going to look like on a TV, select sample scenes, author a quick test DVD and play it back on the DVD player to a TV set.

With a DV digital camera you will get much better results importing the DV format over IEEE-1394 but the tradeoff is hard disk space consumed and longer DVD encoding time. The pros will use this approach to get the best quality result.

The Dazzle approach of real time encoding to MPeg2 is quicker and uses less disk space with the tradeoff of picture quality and control of the process. Since the video is directly captured to MPeg2, you are limited to editing and effects software that directly works with compressed MPeg2 video.