Poor definition from a Sony DCR-HC51

[marklewis]

Hello

I film using a Sony DCR-HC51 camera (SD format) on Mini-DV and capture to Première Pro CS4. However since moving Windows XP to Windows 7 (64 bit) I've noticed (although I'm not sure this is the primary factor) that when I display the film in full screen that there the definition is quite poor (pixels are visible). How can I determine the cause or is this normal?

I have two Nvidia 9500 GT video cards and 12 Gb of memory and capture to a Matrox RTX2 (SD) which should work well. My question really is, could this simply be due simply to the fact that I'm in SD format?

Regards

[jagabo]

First, try changing the output device used by the media player. If that doesn't fix the problem:

Try updating the graphics card's drivers to the latest WHQL certified drivers from Nvidia. If that doesn't work try changing the scaling algorithm used by the driver to scale video. If that doesn't work disable the drivers video enhancement features (bugs in those features often cause the problem you are seeing).

[poisondeathray]

Is this full screen in Premiere Pro ? or another application

If Premiere, did you set full quality for the preview ?

If other media players look just as bad, but it looked better on XP , then it's likely a driver issue as jagabo stated above

[marklewis]

OK thanks for these comments. I'm talking about visusalising in Première Pro.

What do you mean by the media player? Do I have a choice of player within Premiere ?

I've compared other videos using VLC for instance and I dont have issues. I will try and compare like with like to see if its specifically a Premiere issue.

Drivers were up to date last time I looked. I'll look again.

What is the scaling algorithm or at least where can I find settings for it?

I'm using best quality output [in Premiere] but there is a setting to adapt the output to the screen size. Should I use 100% or adapt? Up till now I've used both interchangeably, but I guess that adapt uses an algorithm right?

Not sure about video enhancement in the driver. Never seen anything in Nvidia drivers that enables me to set that.

[poisondeathray]

By other media player, yes I meant something like VLC

You cannot change the scaling algorithm for the preview in PP CS4. It uses bilinear resize for the preview in the program monitor, so it tends to be softer. You can only change the preview quality and if you've tried best, that's all you can do. The actual rendered export doesn't use bilinear for any resizing, it uses bicubic resize

[jagabo]

You cannot change the scaling algorithm for the preview in PP CS4. It uses bilinear resize for the preview in the program monitor, so it tends to be softer.

Does it use it's own bilinear resize or does it leave the scaling up to Windows? If the latter it would be up to whatever Windows decides to use.

[marklewis]

Does this mean that I can expect a better quality once rendered than in preview even without adding effects?
And I assume that exporting to dvd through Encore also is similar to rendering, although that should probably be discussed separately.

[poisondeathray]

You cannot change the scaling algorithm for the preview in PP CS4. It uses bilinear resize for the preview in the program monitor, so it tends to be softer.

Does it use it's own bilinear resize or does it leave the scaling up to Windows? If the latter it would be up to whatever Windows decides to use.

I'm pretty sure it uses it's own (scaling through the software)

Highest Quality Displays video in the monitor at full resolution.

Draft Quality Displays video in the monitor at one-half standard-definition resolution, or one-quarter resolution for
drafts of HD clips.

Automatic Quality Measures playback performance and dynamically adjusts quality.

Note: All quality settings use a bilinear pixel resampling method to resize the video image. For exporting a sequence, a
cubic resampling method (which is superior to bilinear) is used.

[poisondeathray]

Does this mean that I can expect a better quality once rendered than in preview even without adding effects?
And I assume that exporting to dvd through Encore also is similar to rendering, although that should probably be discussed separately.

Presumably you're not doing any scaling during export . SD=>SD ?

So it would depend on the other application or hardware and what it uses to scale to full screen

Yes exporting though Encore is rendering. It has to be rendered somewhere, at somepoint in your workflow to MPEG-2 for DVD.