Poor quality video after capturing on PC

[andysgriff]

Does anyone have any idea why the quality of a digital video would reduce dramatically after capturing on a PC compared with the original tape. It's a Sony digital handycam connected by fire wire to the PC. The software is ULead Video Studio 9 and all the settings and options are set for maximum resolution. The picture quality is fine when the Digicam is connected directly to TV and the tape is played, but during capture (AVI format) and the subsequent production is complete the picture quality is pants, pixelated and grainy?? Any ideas appreciated.

[thepassenger]

Scratched my head about this until I spotted that your transcoding to AVI; does ulead have the ability to write the DV stream to disk or perhaps write it out as MPEG2? Might help matters although video editing isn't something I generally do so I'm in the dark

[andysgriff]

Yep, there is an option to transcode to MPEG (not MPEG2), not sure about the direct to dosk option. I'll give it a go. Thanks.

[police state]

Andy,

does it look ok in the captured AVI?, if so, it is definately your choice of output format, if it's not ok in the captured format, try defragging your drives.

[boozyhughesy]

I've got the exact same problem, I've come back from Farnborough and the quality on the PC is terrible, please help!!! have a shedload of stuff from OZ to copy as well and it just doesn't work!

[thepassenger]

Personally if you've got the disk space I would capture the video as MPEG-2 as this seems to be pretty much the easiest thing for hardware to cope with (it's also pretty hungry on disk space). Make sure the capture software isn't trying to crop, knows the framerate (PAL is 25fps) and is set to do nothing more than de-interlace the video stream (even that's optional on the first pass).
Hopefully a video boffin will wander past and help us poor deluded fools

[andysgriff]

thepassenger said:

Personally if you've got the disk space I would capture the video as MPEG-2 as this seems to be pretty much the easiest thing for hardware to cope with (it's also pretty hungry on disk space). Make sure the capture software isn't trying to crop, knows the framerate (PAL is 25fps) and is set to do nothing more than de-interlace the video stream (even that's optional on the first pass).
Hopefully a video boffin will wander past and help us poor deluded fools

No problem with Disk space, >400GB free, Ulead doesnt have the option to output to MPEG-2. I will look at changing the software, not hard as it all 80p for a working copy here in KL. Not sure about the cropping and checking the framerate, I've bascially tried all variations of advanced setting.

How do I check the interlacing?

Can anyone recommend a good video capturing/editing package?
Thanks