Are there any Speilbergs out there who can help me?
I've been transferring digital video footage (tape) onto my computer, but the quality deteriorates big time.
(Crystal clear when I hook video camera directly to TV for playback, terrible when I load it onto the computer)
I use a DV cable and windows movie maker.
Is either one of these the problem?
If WMM is the issue, what software programs are better?
What sort of file are you capturing it as? Saving it as DV-AVI is the highest quality the WMM will do (I think).
Personally, I use Sony Vegas Pro 8, mainly cos I am a geek and like to have lots of software lol.
Hey Bondy I will bring you a copy of a better program to the beach. It will capture your dv at full quality and let you pump it out onto a dvd. I have a firewire card in my PC to connect the camcorder to [I dont use the usb port]. Not sure if you wil be able to use the usb port, I think a card is about $50 and you will need a cable.
I guess stehsegler, you are being your usual helpful self.
Bondalucci, you may want to check what resolution your video camera captures at.
Non HD TV is actually pretty low resolution and non HD digital video cameras may have pixel resolution as low as 640x480. When you view this on the telly, it looks fine, but if you have a LCD monitor for our PC, the resolution can be 1800x1600 or greater.
If you watch the vide full screen on a hi res monitor then it will look grainy and pixelated as the software will try and smooth off the image when it has to fill the rest of the pixels on the screen.
Hope this makes sense.
mac = wonderful computer for computer dummies who don't want to know anything about computers but like art
yes i got a mac too
now climbing into asbestos underwear as i await predicted response from stehsegler and nebs
sorry nebs, i know you're not the typical mac user
buy a mac if you need someone to hold your hand, otherwise spend less and get something with some power that you can customize to your everyneed.
pm'd see if i can help you out
Its the new Holden v Ford
Neil Pryde v The rest
Starboard v Jp
And the list goes on..... Good Vid Flacky
Back to the topic... I don't think it's been said in the replies, but you must save in as AVI or non-lossy as you can.
If the result of the transfer is already an MPEG (sometimes a setting in the cam), then transfer as is.
The result will be one or many humongous files often. Buy those cheap USB external drives, usually 300-500Gb, works well.
Any software that meddles with the original other than copy verbatim will cause degradation, usually severe. Check the settings for your transfer S/W to make sure all is uncompressed, best-quality, etc.
There are 3 major degradations possible: from AVI-uncompressed-original (the latter might be compressed in the cam) to a transformed/compressed. Worst case is AVI to a low-qual MPEG or worse AVI to WMV from Movie Maker. Avoid those, it's usually done to save space - see what happens. And if you mentionned you used WMM, you're toast...
Again: save in the original format, extract what you want, pref. in AVI (Solveign, etc.) in plain, unmodified. Then do compress the result to send to Web, Tubes, local porn show, etc. Do not touch original.
Other degradation is to change resolution, esp. when going YouTube. It's called inter or intrapolation. Resolution going from VGA to YouTube's screwed up 3-something by 2-something. An 80s format.
One last degradation in the clips is when you apply those cute transformations. Brightness, cropping, rotation, muting parts, etc. Even clipping and rotates usually introduce degradation (or a huger re-capture of the original).
Hope this helps, mate.
if u haven't already got it - this is quite a popular freeware lossless codec u can use in an .MOV or .AVI container. Good balance on cpu taxing v hard drive taxing (space & speed) and editability
www.stokebloke.com/video/huffyuv.php
Personally -I operate soley on a mac (Final Cut studio) and it works well
the fact is that the Windows operating systems is also pretty damn good these days.
Editing is much the same whether you are on Pc or mac - the software is quite similar to navigate - i jumped on Adobe premiere on a PC recently and was totally confident straight away.
At the end of the day either platform is just a tool - no real point getting emotive about it -
although a Windows or OSX machine trying to run software outside of what it can deal with will suck no matter what - and this is primarily where you hear complaints from both camps.
Heres some real advice - I reckon Sony vegas on PC is the go - its only a couple hundred bucks and it is a very powerful bit of software for the price.
Dont muck around with the free stuff - it will only hold you back in the long run - sony are pretty good at keeping up with new formats like memory card based AVCHD formats.
With External Hard drives - - speed is your friend - spring for the Firewire 400 connected version - the usb cable connected external hard drives are a little sluggish for my liking... External hard drives are a must as they leave your operating system hard drive to do the hard work like transcoding on capture while running the operating system - (and all the other programs you forgot to close down )
educational stuff for anyone following this thread..
i have found that firewire 400 runs way quicker than USb - i believe Firewire has a greater sustained speed whereas usb has a greater peak speed.
firewire is certain held as the base standard for DV / HDV editing / live capture / live print to video) speed in the video world - whereas as USB is generally avoided - i certainly found that the one usb ext hard drive i use is a little troublesome.
There is something "nice" about working in the mac os environment each day.
done a bit of digging around...
... I guess on a sustained throughput FireWire is faster than USB 2.0. Apparently due to the way the Firewire architecture handles data traffic...
I have found that in the last few years as hardware come down a lot in price so has the quality. This is to the point where I now backup everything onto two identical hard drives just to be sure. Used backup to tape drives but after a couple of bad experiences a few years back lost faith in that medium.
since we're on the topic - anyone locally want to buy 5 of IDE icecube external enclosures with 2 daisychainable firewire 400 & usb 2? I'm finding firewire 400 & 800 too slow with multiple stacked tracks of 1920x1080 footage in ceneform or huffy and I've replaced them with e-sata enclosures. They basically just sat on the table and never got moved. Look like new and are nearly 2 years old. The empty enclosures are currently about $120 new from local computer shops, and was hoping to get maybe just under half that for each. I know that sounds rich for external enclosures, but the firewire interface is the oxford chipset (not the prolific) so it guarenteed reliable on both mac/pc.
they are good enclosures but I just binned 3 of them and replaced them with 4 1 Gbyte Lacie USB 2.0 drives for $200 each... No firewire though.
haircut...
harris technology (ht.com.au) had the lacie 1 Gbyte lacie drives for $200. They have since increased the price to $249 but I think that's still a steal.
thanks for the link - no denying the price is great, but as u know it's just that usb2 speed is too inconsistent, or have i missed something and should i have been looking for external sata enclosures inc drive for $250 on that website? I found the shintaro e-sata enclosure for $75, i just not sure it will work with my sata2 card. I've read that some folk are having problems with the cheaper enclosures and the adaptec cards
anyway, i got 2 new esata enclosures now and so far they work fine, but exy$
from my experience bus architectures work as follows:
1) bus architecture is released
2) card become available for use in PCs, external enclosures become available, all these are usually made by some company in Taiwan, implementation works if you get the right components otherwise things can be a bit flaky
3) main stream PC/ Mac manufacturers start including the bus architectures as standard in their systems, drivers become more stable, implementations become more stable and actually usable
4) a new faster bus architecture comes onto the market and the cycle starts again.
I think eSata is currently in-between stage 2 and 3. It's starting to appear as a standard implementation in the main stream systems. External drives and enclosures from companies like Lacie actually work quite well but it's all still a bit pricey.
I almost went the eSata route but decided against it. At the moment I use large internal drives for video editing and 1 Tbyte USB 2.0 drives to backup.
I might change this setup again in 6 or 12 months time.
BTW, there is a Lacie 1 Tbyte drive with Firewire 800 and eSata. It's about $349 at HT but you might be able to get it a bit cheaper elsewhere... (eg. i-tech.com.au or streetwise.com.au)
that's pretty good. works out about $45 cheaper for me per drive+enclosure if they work reliably
i'm using the esata stuff so i can jump between mac and PC quickly without copying stuff, and so i can use the lappys if need be with sata express card
Man, this thread got pretty technical, pretty quickly.
- I feel like the guy who asked "whats the time?"...and they told him how to build a watch!
Anyway, thanks to all the guys who pm'd me. Jman has put me onto a Pinnacle Studios Plus software program that seems way better than WMM for retaining picture quality... and still only using a DV cable.
Sorry if I don't get back to all those who offered help.
Sounds like other people got new info too, cheers.
