Hey, I've recently purchased a Samsung Mini Dv and I've taken some footage with it. When played back on the LCD and through the RCA jacks on my TV, the quality was great. I tried to transfer it to my computer using the firewire and Sonic MyDVD and Windows Movie Maker and the quality greatly decreased...It saves as a large file(.avi), BUT the quality goes down. Any ideas on why this happens and if there is a way to stop this? Is it the programs I'm using? Any help is greatly appreciated.
I'm really still new to this stuff but I'll try to help based on my limited knowledge.
Firewire should in no may cause degradation or signal loss. That's why it's used for video/audio applications like camcorder/computer connections, etc. And because it allows two way communications.
My new camcorder connects to the television with RCA cables too. I hate that because I would have prefered an S-Video option at least. Anyway video quality from "not real good" to "great": RF, Composite (RCA), S-Video, Component and the future: DVI/HDMI.
I tried Windows Movie Maker first (it was all I had to start with). It does a great job of capturing the video from the camcorder and then saving it as an AVI file. NOTE: I haven't done any "long" 30-60 minute movies yet. The quality I got was pretty good: for the computer. I don't think it would hold up very good on my big-screen television though. Unfortunately, I don't have an easy way at the moment to watch AVI files on my tv. So, I used Dr. DivX to convert the AVI file to DivX. I have plenty of DivX compatible DVD players and the playback quality was just OK. There were the usual compression artifacts and of course the video didn't look nearly as good as the original DV.
So with Window Movie Maker and Dr. DivX for that matter, you are going to get degradation in the form of compresion artifacts. The flip side is that these formats save space and allow more scenes/movies to be stored on smaller media.
I've had better luck using Ulead VideoStudio 9 (I got it for its 16:9 support which I prefer to use). It outputs to DVD, creats motion menus, the works and the output is just as good as the original DV in my opinion when played on any regular DVD player. The quality is several steps down from DVD quality but on par with the original DVD "master" video I took with my camcorder. NOTE: my camcorder (Canon zr300) is not exactly top of the line and the sensor resolution isn't the highest.
Chyeck if you're using the right codec while transferring and that you're not compressing it with some other codec while capturing it. A simple check is to see if it is about 13GB per hour. If that is the case you're probably just transferring to DV-AVI which is OK.
Don't try to judge the quality of the footage played on your PC and sent to your PC monitor, because theat quality is also influenced by the speed of your PC, your video card and your monitor.
Everything looks better on a TV. It just does, try watching a 3 mbit/s or 4 mbit/s DVD on your TV, and then on your computer. The low quality is much more visible on your computer.
I've got myDVD also, is this the LE version that came with something (such as a burner or tv card) or do you have the full product? I'm kinda new to the software also but I'm pretty sure there are quality settings someplace in the software--where I'm afraid I don't know but since the software has the ability to "adjust" quality settings to make stuff fit on a disk it's logical that it's there somewhere. Start looking around in menus and preferences.....good luck.
DV footage will always look worse on a computer monitor because the video is interlaced but the display is progressive. Also, while you see the full resolution on your monitor, using composite video outputs or the LCD from the camcorder you'll get the equivalent of a much lower resolution so you won't be able to make out all the imperfections. To make things even more complicated, while the video will be identical to what's on the tape, the codec used to view it will change how it looks (which will also affect how it looks after encoding to another format). I highly recommend reading through at least the first post here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33526
To sum it up:
Quote:For RBG color space (e.g. for VirtualDub) the Panasonic DV decoder is the preferred choice. The Canopus decoder can't be used for that application due to it's chroma upsampling bug, and is also not preferred due to the reduced luminance range.
For YUY2 (e.g. AVISynth) I use the Canopus decoder and use the "FixBrokenChromaUpsampling" function to correct it's bug.
The MainConcept decoder applies too much sharpening for my taste, but if your source is noise-free than this decoder might be your decoder of choice as it supports both YUV2 and RGB, and does not suffer from the chroma upsampling bug.
