Capturing video problems

newvideoguy wrote on 12/29/2002, 6:29 PM
When I capture video from my camcorder via firewire to my pc, I noticed that the quality of the video is degraded alot. Is there a way that i could improve this?

I would apprecitate any feedback,

My system consists of
Windows XP pro
Motherboard Asus A7M266-D
Dual Processor AMD MP2000
1GHZ of DDR SDRAM
2 80GIG Special Edition 8ms HD
Turtle beach sound card
Standard Firewire card
Sony DCR-VX2000

Comments

rextilleon wrote on 12/29/2002, 6:43 PM
You will have to define degraded to us----Of course, viewing your captured video in the video preview window, it will always look "degraded" The important thing is that it looks well when you go out from your NLE to Tape or DVD etc. Are you getting poor quality on output?
newvideoguy wrote on 12/29/2002, 7:59 PM
When I convert to mpeg2 and view the file in the pc with windows player. I noticed that the video is distorted specially when people wave there hands. but when i view the original with the camera on the television the video is perfect.

I hope this is a clear.

The video card that I'm using is Radeon 8500 with 128mbRam
Chienworks wrote on 12/29/2002, 9:05 PM
MPEG is always going to look worse than a more uncompressed format, especially around small details and fast movement. This is the nature of compression.
newvideoguy wrote on 12/30/2002, 10:24 AM
Is there any way that i could improve the video quality so that the distorted video is not noticeable.

any recommendations???
Chienworks wrote on 12/30/2002, 11:26 AM
Using a higher bitrate when encoding will generally give a better quality image. Most DVDs are encoded in the 8,000,000 range. Of course, this will use 8 times as much drive space as a file encoded at 1,000,000. Use two-pass encoding and set the quality slider as high as it will go. What is the end use of our MPEG files? Will you be showing them on your computer? Putting them on data CDs as .mpg files? Creating DVDs or VCDs? Serving them on the web?
newvideoguy wrote on 12/30/2002, 11:44 AM
The end product will be in dvd. The original video is about 1.5hours. When i capture the video through firewire and there is distortion on the video on computer but not in the master tape.By viewing the AVI file with windows media player i see the distortion. Is that the cause of this problem. Have you seen this problem and is there a way around this??
Chienworks wrote on 12/30/2002, 12:07 PM
Is this distortion mostly a general fuzziness and lack of sharpness when watching the DV .avi file in Media Player? If so, it's probably due to the fact that by default Media Player displays DV files at half resolution. In MP 7, go to Tools / Options / Performance and change the Digital Video (DV) settings: slider to Large (all the way to the right). Other versions may have this setting on a different menu tab but it should be easy enough to find. This will force Media Player to show DV files at full resolution.