Way OT - digital camcorders

Hi all, As a Christmas present to myself I bought a Sony DV Camcorder HC35. Alot more compact than the old video cameras and really excellent to take to trials and various Landy "do's". The playback on the TV is really good ie. if you plug it straight in. However today, i downloaded a few clips onto the laptop and chucked them together in Movie Maker and if you watch it on full screen the quality is absolutely awful. It's like i've taken it with my mobile phone. I didn't expect it to be quite as good as it is on the TV but it's not nice to watch at all. Anyone got any ideas before I convince myself that the camcorder was a duff purchase. Dave

Reply to
Dave R
Loading thread data ...

Dave R uttered summat worrerz funny about:

I found the same when I used a TV card I borrowed from the FIL. When I returned it I purchased Dazzle which comes with Pinnacle software.

The TV Card used to drop shed loads of frames in the transition so the image appeared as you describe when burned to a DVD or VCD.

Pinnacle and Dazzle (same software but new hardware) doesn't drop a single frame. However I did get some ocassional blocky flickers on the DVD's I'd burned. I tried again at medium setting and it's now fine and the image is as good on DVD and VCD playback as it is in the playback direct through the TV.

Dazzle is a plugin hardware USB device, it has AV Audio Phone and S Vid inputs. It's just the ticket for my needs now. Pinnacle tells me my Video driver is out of date yet it's the latest I can find.

Dazzle cost just over £45 with Pinacle editing software inc. I'm not disappointed but was previously very disappointed.

Otherwise it may be just your video adapter on the laptop not being up to the required spec.

I'm no expert , these are just my experiences.

Lee D

Reply to
Dr_D

Are you using Firewire to capture the video? USB 2.0 is not bad these days, but personally, I've had much better experiences with Firewire.

Check the settings, you're probably capturing at a quality "suitable for email" or something. Windows Movie Maker lets you capture at all sorts of quality settings. You probably want to click "advanced" before you capture and have a looky and a wee play about.

My advice is to capture in the highest quality you can afford the disk space for. Highest quality low compression on my camera takes something like 187Mb per minute IIRC, it might be even more than that.

When you've cut something together you can choose the output quality so you can make it the same quality as came off the camera or shrink it down to something you can happily email to your auntie on dialup.

HTH.

Reply to
Douglas Payne

Right, i've had a bit of a tinker with this now and it appears that the quality of the video clips when you look at them individually with Media Player arent that bad, and of good enough quality for me at least it seems that the problems occur when buggering about with Movie Maker. So it appears that maybe there is a setting in Movie Maker that is causing an issue? Has anyone got any experience of movie maker?

Also, i havent got a DVD burner, can you play CDRs on DVD players or is that dull?

Christ, give me a gearbox to rebuild anyday!

Where would i get one of these Pinnacle/Dazzle things, sounds like some kind of washing powder!........

Do i need to budget for a DVD burner aswell, I have a Dell desktop and a new Inspiron laptop, neither of which has a DVD burner......arse.

More help required please..........

Reply to
Dave R

This may be related. Is Movie Maker outputting in one of the CD- compatible formats, because you don't have a DVD writer?

The video-on-CD formats are VCD and SVCD, which are more-or-less at the quality standard of a VHS recording, very standard and very widely supported. I'd be a little surprised if they couldn't be played. They don't use the data-CD format, so you need to do more than just copy the files.

KVCD is an ingenious hack which lets some DVD players playback more than the standard 1 hour from a VCD, but writing it is a bit of hassle.

You can put DVD-quality/format on a CD but it's pushing some of the limits as it needs a high disk-speed for playback.

One thing to look into: some DVD players (often low-price but not the cheapest) can now playback DivX files. This is MPEG-4 compression, putting DVD-quality into the sort of space used by VCD. It might not be worth replacing a DVD player just to get this, but be aware of the option.

Generally, it doesn't matter if the delivery of the digital datafile is slow. You get all the data. But you don't want to convert the data until you get it all on your PC. You don't need video _capture_, you need _download_ from the camcorder.

Reply to
David G. Bell

I'm having fun and games with this too. As your tape already holds the file as digital you capture it straight with movie maker. Trouble is movie maker doesn't seem to have a provision for building the .avi clips into chapters of a dvd. The programs which come with many dvd recorders seem to assemble 2GB .avi clips ( about 14 minutes each with my daughter's DV camera) and then join and compress them (MPEG2??) to burn them to a DVD.

There seem to be a number of programs to do this available as free downloads, I fetched Super by erightsoft but haven't figured out how to use it yet.

I have been advised that should I wish to convert old vhs tapes to DVD that the inbuilt "pass thru" facility on some DV cameras is better than a capture card in the computer.

AJH

Reply to
AJH

So you have the means to copy from the camera to your PC?

I assume you're editing and saving a new file back to your HDD and this is the one causing the problems?

If so what quality setting are you using?

Movie maker doesn't produce the best quality in the world, but it shouldn't be "absolutely awful".

It entirely depends on the DVD player. I used to have one that would play absolutely anything until it blew up ;(

These days I use a cheap chinese HDD player off ebay that plugs into the computer via USB, once you have copied the files ontop it you can plug it into the TV to wtach them. As long as I'm not needing to send videos to other folks I don't bother burning them to DVD format, every time you re-encode a file you lose a bit more quality IME.

Its an option. If you are going to have a load of digital video files to backup and you try to do it by burning to CD, you'll most likely soon be rushing out for something that can burn more data to a single disc.

regards

Tim Jones

Reply to
Tim Jones

The 2GB limit comes from the hard drive's filesystem. Which is why a version of Windows which fully supports the NTFS filesystem is a good idea. Video editing can use some huge files.

I find myself wondering how much net bandwidth Peter Jackson needed between New Zealand and London when he was recording the soundtrack and editing The Return of the King. New Zealand used to be notoriously limited: not any more, I think.

Reply to
David G. Bell

So, to summarise. I may need a DVD burner, not a problem, i'll buy an external one if I have to even if it is a bit more expensive than salpping a =A330 one in the desktop. The desktop is in the babies' room and I don't see the point in having a laptop if I have to use the other one every time to do some editing..........

Therefore, i'm kind of back to square one. I'm using a USB lead to download the DV tape to the PC. Do i need to buy a firewire lead a.) where do i get one b.) what the hell is it. Sony goes on about a i-link lead, any idea what this is?...........would it help me at all?

Apart from Dr Ds advice about getting some dishwasher tablets to plug into the USB port, anyone got anymore ideas?

Has anyone used Movie Maker in any detail, I think there may be some obscure setting out somewhere that makes the quality go worse. One last cry for help...

Dave

Reply to
Dave R

If you want one in a hurry and don't mind paying a silly price, PC World or probably Comet etc. If you want one at a sensible price,

formatting link
Don't know whether you need one though.... :) My Handycam DV certainly works Firewire only, USB isn't fast enough to stream the data to the PC and is only for the lousy digital photos it will take.

If you are currently getting it onto the PC via a capture card then quality will be pretty poor. Do it via firewire entirely digitally at the highest quality setting and you've got a perfect copy. And a very full hard disk...

Reply to
Tim Hobbs

Ok, the laptop already has a firewire port, but how do i know that it will fit to camcorder? Also, how can I adjust the quality, you have to open the capture program on the laptop and then press play on the camcorder?..........

Dave

Reply to
Dave R

i-link is what sony calls Firewire I think. Getting a firewire cable will only help if your computer also has firewire.

As I undertand it, Firewire is a data transfer standard, like USB, but the processing of 1s and 0s happens on the hardware rather than partially by the computer's CPU. It generally works better for sustained high speed transfers than USB2.0 although it's theoretical throughput is lower.

Keep fiddling with the movie maker settings (c:

When you save the movie to a file, choose to save it to your computer and choose 'other settings'. The higher the kbps rating, the better the quality, but the bigger the file. 320x240 looks a bit rough, but

640x480 is quite passable on my machine.

If you've not got as far as saving the output to a movie file, the preview playback in movie maker can be a bit rubbish, as I think it uses a miniaturised version of the original file to make things work faster when you are cutting about with stuff.

Reply to
Douglas Payne

My liteon one from Ebuyer cost 15 quid

You will need a firewire card (I think this shows up as an IEEE 1394 controller under devices) to plug the firewire into. If you think the usb is downloading a full fat DV file onto the pc I think I'd stick with it even if slow. I think it's a bit like the difference between music as a .wav file and an mp3, ones uncompressed and takes a lot of space, so you need to convert it to the DVD format and then burn it.

As Tim says the usb only seems to download still images on my daughters DV camera.

Assuming you have a firewire port then you need video capture software that compresses and converts. paid for software includes Nero, Roxio and pinnacle, lite versions of these are sometimes bundled with the more expensive dived writers.

I've a horrible feeling movie maker is not up to the job.

If you find a cheap solution before I get around to playing then let us know. I'm beginning to think a stand alone dvd player/recorder that accepts the DV input may be easier.

AJH

Reply to
AJH

If your camera has i-link you buy a cable with an end that fits both the firewire port and the camera. Some laptops only have mini firewire ports while some have full-size ones. Does the firewire port on your laptop look like the i-link hole in your camera? Or it bigger and shaped roughly like a little house[1]. You want a cable that fits at both ends. I suspect this isn't entirely your problem though.

Windows movie maker can probably import video from USB, it certainly can from a firewire device. There is an update for it however, the version that shipped with XP originally wasn't very good seemingly. It's optional I think, have a root around the optional stuff on windows update.

[1] __ / \ | | |__|
Reply to
Douglas Payne

Telecom NZ (who own about 50% of the Southern Cross cable - NZ's main digital link to the rest of the world) did PJ a deal on cheap bandwidth in return for the advertising mileage. The rest of us poor sods are still paying through the nose for any sort of international bandwidth (if we can get any at all).

Reply to
EMB

I had a 2002 Sony DC9??? Digital Video Camera using tapes. I eventually bought a Dazzle90 with freebie Pinnacle Studio. I played around with Windoze Movie Maker but eventually upgraded to Pinacle Studio 9 and haven't looked back since. Great for email video clips, PC video clips, TV/DVD output clips and editing the.rec files that I get off my Topfield PVR - now have 90+ films in my DVD library - all off the TV :-)

The only thing I need now is more time for all these toys and my two Land Rovers !

Neil

Reply to
bumble101

Dave R uttered summat worrerz funny about:

Dazzle from Ebuyer

formatting link
£37 inc the VAT. come down since I got mine. You can also use it to burn direct to DVD without faffing... or play your old Vids in to put on DVD. The Unit does the Video processing and not the computer so that sounds better to me for laptop needs.

Lee D

Reply to
Dr_D

Dr_D uttered summat worrerz funny about:

Forgot to say, also comes with all the editing software which is excellent compared to other s**te I've had the displeasure of.

:-)

Reply to
Dr_D

Thanks for this Lee, I think I will go this way. I need something reasonable priced and something that I stand a chance of understanding how it works! Will treat myself next pay packet......

Thanks again one and all,

Dave

Reply to
Dave R

lee, i've just had a look at this, i get the impression that this is not really for use with digital DV camcorders, is that the case. From the description, it seems it is a converter for changing analogue to digital nes-pas? Dave

Reply to
Dave R

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.