Capture poor quality video

I'm using USB .. how do I use firewire? Do we need cable to connect? How
much is the wire costs? I've bright qualtiy pics on camcorder but
computer captures dark video.. how do I improve ?


The March Hare (MVP) wrote:

>>I've Sony TRV25 windows XP 384mb pentium II 300mhz 40gb HD env..
>>When I play the video from the camera it looks great ..when I capture
>>video from the Movie Maker or Pixel ImageMixer the quality is very bad,
>>i cant see pics clearly ,it cant forward when i burn,.... HOw do I
>>capture same quality as from camera? Is there anything setup in camera
>>or s/w I missing ?

>
>
> Are you using FireWire or USB to capture? The camcorder may have come with
> a USB cable, but the video quality from it is lousy.
>
>

>>>I've Sony TRV25 windows XP 384mb pentium II 300mhz 40gb HD env..
>>>When I play the video from the camera it looks great ..when I capture
>>>video from the Movie Maker or Pixel ImageMixer the quality is very bad,
>>>i cant see pics clearly ,it cant forward when i burn,.... HOw do I
>>>capture same quality as from camera? Is there anything setup in camera
>>>or s/w I missing ?

>> Are you using FireWire or USB to capture? The camcorder may have come with
>> a USB cable, but the video quality from it is lousy.

>I'm using USB .. how do I use firewire? Do we need cable to connect? How
>much is the wire costs? I've bright qualtiy pics on camcorder but
>computer captures dark video.. how do I improve ?

Assuming that your camcorder also has a Firewire port, buy a Firewire
card (about $20.00 US) and install it into a PCI slot (assuming you
have one available). Windows XP will probably recognize it and install
the correct drivers for it. You'll also have to buy a Firewire cable
(about $10.00 - $20.00 depending on length) if the Firewire card
didn't come with one. Make sure one end of the cable fits your
camcorder port and the other end fits your new Firewire card port.

If all goes well and you still have trouble capturing I suggest you
buy the inexpensive AV_IO capture software. I haven't used it but I've
read nothing but good things about its ability to capture DV-AVI with
good audio/video synch when others failed.

What will be the final format for your video? You almost certainly
don't want to keep it as DV-AVI because the file size will be so
large, especially for your hard drive.

Correcting the color and brightness of your video should be done by
the software that will convert your avi file to its final format. MM2
can correct the color/brightness/contrast and save it in the wmv
format. TMPGenc can correct the color/brightness/contrast and save the
avi file as an MPEG1/VCD (freeware) or MPEG2/DVD (payware) mpg file.

BTW, your 300MHz processor is too slow to do video encoding in a
reasonable amount of time. Your playback might also be choppy. And
your small 40 MB hard drive sounds iffy for video storage. I'm
surprised you were able to do any capturing at all unless your video
was very small to begin with.