Shouldn't my captured video (from ZR300) be better than this?

[garybeck]

hello

I finally upgraded from my old analog video camera. On a low budget I got a Canon ZR300. The sales guy at Best Buy said the video would be at least as good quality as my old analog.

so the camera didn't come with any video editing software, or anything for transferring to the computer, other than a firewire port. So I bought a firewire cable, and all I can figure to use is Windows Movie Maker to import the video from the camera.

Then, still using Windows Movie Maker, i save the file at "high quality video NTSC" setting. It ends up as a WMV file, which I then use Sonic DVD to burn a DVD.

The quality is DEFINITELY not as good as my old analog. I can see jagged edges on all the lines. the sound is fine, the color is OK, but the resolution is crap. The camera is supposed to be 640 pixels I think, and as I understand a TV is 720, so it should be pretty good, almost the max a TV can show.

So is there anything I can do that can give me a better end result? Is Windows Movie Maker the best thing for importing the video, or is there something else?

thanks
gary in vermont

[JimboS]

Use ANYTHING other than Movie Maker...
I personally use Pinnacle Studio + 9.4 and it is great..
Some folks out there seem to have problems with Pinnacle though
Some other programs such as Sonic and others will be fine..
Also Movie Maker does CD's(VCD's) which the quality is equal to Video Tapes...
You need to convert to DVD and burn to DVD not CD...
You will then see the differance...

[redwudz]

A good basic transfer program is WinDV. That should get your DV to your hard drive with exactly the same quality as is on the DV tape. What you do from there will determine the output quality.

Actually WMM does OK. It is easy to edit with. But you need to set the output to DV and encode that if you want to go to DVD format. WMM doesn't output MPEG. Don't convert to WMV, then convert again to MPEG-2. You will have quality losses.

I use WinDV, then edit in VirtualDub Mod, with the addition of the Panasonic DV codec to be able to read the DV format. Then I frameserve the video only from VDM directly to TMPGEnc encoder. I save the audio out with VDM as a WAV format and encode that to AC3 with ffmpeggui. I combine the AC3 with the video in TMPGEnc DVD Author. Then burn to DVD format.

There are several programs you can use for all of these steps. If your final product is a DVD, the most important part is your MPEG-2 encoder settings. That's where you get or lose the quality from your original DV transfer.

Don't go too much by what you see on your computer monitor. Most editing programs don't display interlaced DV properly. You may see interlace artifacts that will not show on a TV. The video will also appear darker than on a TV.

You should be able to get two hours of good quality DV, converted to MPEG-2 on a DVD.