Video Capture in V9 Pixelated and poor quality

[nickcrabbe]

I have used Ulead V9 to capture dv tape from my JVC camcorder befroe and it has been fine. Howver he last two times have produced poor quality pixelated video footage once captured. During teh capture process the original shown on the capture screen comming off the tape is fine.
Any ideas? is there a setting I have wrong in the software?

[Ron P.]

You're capturing DV, by what means, Firewire or capture card? Firewire (IEEE1394) is nothing more than a transfer of data, just like copy/paste. So the quality is not affected at all. Have you checked your capture settings in the capture tab? VS likes DV Type-1 over Type-2. The only other setting available for capture is changing the Capture Device, and if you want to Capture to Library.

What do you have as the Format setting:

• DV
• AVI
• MPEG
• VCD
• SVCD
• DVD
• WMV

VCD, SVCD, and WMV will give a lesser quality, the best quality would be DV or uncompressed AVI (which hogs a whopping 65 gig per hour of video).

[Black Lab]

The format for the project always defaults to MPEG. A couple of times I have forgotten to change that to AVI and the resulting captured files show the symptoms you are experiencing.

[nickcrabbe]

I have just checked the format setting and it was set to MPEG. I think this may be the reason. I have just changed it to DV and will try again.

Cheers

[nickcrabbe]

What is the best output to use? I am not making a movie just vidoes of the family so want good quality but not at 65gig per half hour. Should I capture it straight to DVD format?

[Ron P.]

For the best quality for editing is DV, which is slightly compressed (13gig per hour). If I'm going to do much editing to the video, I always capture to DV, Type-1.

Capturing to MPEG, your PC will have to do the conversion on the fly. Can it keep up?

For output, if you're intension is DVD, then you have no other choices for format type, than MPEG-2.

[2Dogs]

What is the best output to use? I am not making a movie just vidoes of the family so want good quality but not at 65gig per half hour. Should I capture it straight to DVD format?

Using VS to capture from a miniDV camcorder direct to mpeg-2 can give good results, but is much more demanding of your pc. I can get excellent results from my old P4 2.8c, and reckoned a P4 3.2c would give even better results. Nowadays, with very affordable dual core and even quad core pc's, lots more pc's will be capable of capturing direct to mpeg-2. You still have to make sure that your pc is properly set up, with sufficient space on the hard drives and DMA enabled for them, and no intrusive programs set to run.

The principal advantage of direct to mpeg-2 capture is an overall time saving in the editing process - but only if you are careful to match your output properties to the captured mpeg-2 file properties.

The secondary advantage, much less significant these days with affordable large drives, is a saving in disc space usage.

The big disadvantage is that you can achieve better picture quality in your finished DVD (assuming that is your target format) if you capture to DV type 1 avi and follow the workflow described in the "sticky" on the Recommended Procedure at the top of the forum.

All of this is moot in your case, unfortunately, since I gather from clicking on your "system" information that you do not possess a computer!