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afterdawn.com > forums > digital video > video capturing from analog sources > firewire quality is worse than s-video???
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Firewire quality is worse than s-video???
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cdcoaster
Junior Member
_ 		6. July 2004 @ 04:16 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
Can someone offer any advice please? I have been helping someone (via email) try and transfer his Hi8 tapes to DVD, but i have now run out of ideas!

He has a Winfast 2000xp capture card and can transfer his films from his Hi8 cam to his h/drive via s-video leads using xp's movie maker or Nero but he is not happy with the quality (i know Nero's codec is hardly the best).
To try and improve things he has installed an NEC firewire card, but initially the signal from the cam (sorry i don't know what type it is) via firewire was not found by the Winfast capture software, (in the configuration settings for Winfast the firewire card was not found so could not be selected as the input source)
This was cured with the latest Winfast drivers, but the signal from the firewire is worse than from the s-video, being jerky and unstable?

I only use my capture card via composite leads to transfer from VHS so i do not know about firewire and capturing from cams but i thought firewire was the best way to capture from a cam?
Anyone got any therories as to why this should be?

Thank you for any help.

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This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 6. July 2004 @ 04:19
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Praetor
Moderator
_ 		6. July 2004 @ 06:47 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
Quote:
Firewire quality is worse than s-video???
I could be horribly wrong here but if I'm not mistaken 1394 was developed for generic file transfer rather than specifically for video transmission like S-video was.... it would make sense that it would be inferior to S-Video
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vurbal
Staff Member

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_ 		7. July 2004 @ 05:09 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
When you transfer via firewire from Hi8 there has to be an analog to digital (probably DV) conversion. In other words you're using the equivalent of a capture device, except that it's in the camcorder instead of in the PC. If it's not a high quality conversion (and apparently it isn't) it won't be as good as the original picture, which is what the S-Video connection gives you.
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Rich Fiscus
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This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7. July 2004 @ 05:09
Minion
AfterDawn Addict
_ 		7. July 2004 @ 15:36 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
A S-Video port is an Analogue Port and a Firewire port is Digital, so if the Hi8 Camcorder has a Firewire Output then it might not be a Hi8 Camcorder But a Digital-8 or a DV Camcorder...You should not be useing the WinFast software to capture from the firewire pory because the WinFast software converts the Signal to Mpeg format when the Incomeing signal is actually DV AVI and that could be why the Quality is so bad....

You should try Captureing from the Firewire Port useing something like "WinDV" or "Scenalizer Live" which both are Made for Transfering DV Files to a PC Via Firewire and the Quality should be much better and then you will have to use a Good Quality encoder to encode the Captured DV AVI file to Mpeg2 for DVD authoring.....
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cdcoaster
Junior Member
_ 		10. July 2004 @ 05:10 _ Link to this message    Send private message to this user   
Thanks for the replies with your help we have know sorted it out, i did not know my friends cam had both s-video and firewire connections and it know makes sense that you do not need to put a DV signal from the cam into a capture card as the whole point of the capture card is to convert analogue signals into digital which the DV signal obviously already is!

What caused the confusion (apart from doing this via email) was the fact that my friend was playing old HI8 analogue tapes in his cam and trying to d/load them via firewire, i did not realise that digital camcorders would support older analogue tapes and i had assumed (never assume anything!) that he was trying to d/load DV.
Thanks again for the help.
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