I shoot the footage looks good ,capture it looks good in the little window.Then if I play one if the avi's on the same computer thru one of my players it looks like garbage,not sharp, colors looks dull.
Also I heard about capturing in qt lossless, is it possible to do in vegas?
Sorry I should been more through in my answer.
Im shooting dv with a dvx100a, it looks good in the capture window in vegas.It looks poor in the preview window in vegas and then I tried QT when small looks good like 320 sharp and colors looks good but at 640 looks not sharp and colors looks washed out, then I tired avs dvd player the picture was bigger looked poor.
I wanted QT lossless because I got the creative cow dvd on rendering and he spoke about and how its smaller then avi files which would make it cool for saving long term.
If you import DV over Firewire then it's coming into the PC as a 480x720 image (in NTSC countries). The DV format is already "compressed" over a raw video image (by about 5:1). Saving a DV clip in a "lossless" format makes no sense. You're talking apples and oranges.
What are you trying to accomplish? What is the final purpose?
By it's very nature, DV is already compressed )approx. 5:1) on tape.
It doesn't make any difference if it's captured by a PC or a Mac. It's still 13 gig per hour.
Uncompressed is MUCH larger (90 gig/hr. if not more).
Uncompressed RGB is about 107GB/hour, which makes the DV compression ratio closer to 8.2:1. I still have no idea why it's referred to as 5:1. What has happened to math skills these days???!?!! ;)
By the way, both QuickTime DV and AVI DV are 13GB/hour, and both QuickTime RGB uncompressed and AVI RGB uncompressed are about 107GB/hour. QuickTime and AVI are simply containers for the video data. The data inside can be identical.
The 5:1 figure is calculated after 50% chroma downsampling. SD without any chroma downsampling is about 250Mb/s (or 10 times the DV data rate) but after chroma downsampling of 50% the DCT compression is applied at a 5:1, not a 10:1 rate.