Camcorder HELP

[thefoxes]

Hello Again,

Less than 3-weeks to go, still not received tickets....yet !!

A question for all those camcorder wizz kids out there.
I have just bought a digi camcorder for our trip to Orlando, also i bought a firewire card / cable so i can download movie footage onto my PC and then burn to CD in VCD format.

Well this morning i have tried it out and i have the following issue:

Recording and playing back the footage on the camcorder is OK, but when i recorded it to my PC and then played it back the quality of the picture is very poor - pixulated.

With in windows movie maker i have set the "quality" to highest, but still the picture is poor.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, before we go on holiday.


Thanks

 

[rob@rar.org.uk]

How are you capturing the video on your PC? If you are using the firewire link there is no reason why the video footage should be anything less than full quality (there are no quality settings when transferring digital video via firewire - it's full quality or nothing).

It might be that your graphics card can't cope with displaying full motion, full quality video even though that's what you captured onto your hard disc. Hve you tried playing the footage with a different software player (Quicktime player, or the lastest version of Windows Media Player)?

Regards

Rob

 

[thefoxes]

Originally posted by rob@rar.org.uk
How are you capturing the video on your PC? If you are using the firewire link there is no reason why the video footage should be anything less than full quality (there are no quality settings when transferring digital video via firewire - it's full quality or nothing).

It might be that your graphics card can't cope with displaying full motion, full quality video even though that's what you captured onto your hard disc. Hve you tried playing the footage with a different software player (Quicktime player, or the lastest version of Windows Media Player)?

Hello Rob,

Thanxs for the reply.
I have connected the firewire cable direct from my camcorder to PC.

I can watch other VCD's AND DVD's without any picture quality loss.

I can watch the footage in windows media palyer (latest version), if viewing it in a small window the quality is not too bad (but still pixulated), but if viewed in full screen quality is too bad.

My PC spec is:

P4 2.2GHZ
64Meg graphics card
256RAM


Thanxs

 

[rob@rar.org.uk]

Your PC seems to be plenty powerful enough, so I can't see any reason why playback should be impaired.

The bit whch confuses me is that you say the digital video is pixelated - if there has been any problems capturing digital video it would result in dropped frames (so the picture and sound stutter) not pixelated video. Have you converted the digital video to analogue video somewhere along the line?

One way to test whether the digital vdeo captured on your hard drive is OK would be to play it back out to your camcorder via firewire (assumikng your camcorder has DV-in). If it plays OK on your camcorder viewfinder the footage on the hard disc is OK.

Regards

Rob

 

[thefoxes]

Hi Rob,

Unfortunately my camcorder does not have DV-input.

To download the footage to my PC, all i did was the following:-

Select VCR mode on the camcorder with the DV cable plugged in windows movie maker (windows XP) automatically booted up.
Pressed record on the windows movie maker, and thats it.

The footage on the DV tape (in the camcorder) is perfect, i have just connected the camcorder to the TV and it is perfect picture in full screen mode (i.e across a 32" widescreen tv).

Some how when recording to the PC it is loosing quality.

When i say pixulated, i mean when you view the footage as full screen (or indeed anything larger than the normal size screen when you open any media player), the piture is in square segments as if the DPI is only small.......i hope this makes sense.


Thanks again for your help.

 

[rob@rar.org.uk]

OK, I think I know where the problem is. The size of a standard digital video frame is 720 x 576 pixels. If you are playing this size picture so that it completely fills your PC monitor you are likely to be enlarging it beyond its normal size, hence the pixelation. The video you have captured is fine, but you are trying to enlarge it beyond the size at which it is normally viewed. When you are watching the video picture on your PC make sure that your software (Windows Media Viewer or whatever else you use) is set to "Normal" picture size, rather than full screen. This will ensure you don't get any pixelisation.

Regards

Rob

 

[panpant]

Hi,

I seem to remember there being a problem with Windows Movie Maker when it was released, limiting the size of the window that can be captured. There is an update for this and now Movie Maker 2 is out.

Greg

 

[thefoxes]

Thanks Rob & Greg,

Thats exactly what i did earlier this afternoon, i updated windows movie maker to the latest version, and problem sorted !!!


Thanks Again