Hi there,

Firstly hello all What a great resource!

I have a sony dcr-hc14e dv camera and I recently transferred some DV via firewire. But when I paly back via the PV I get fine horizontal lines on any movement BUT when I transfer to DVD the picture is perfect.

Does anyone know what might be causing this please?

Now I just uploaded some video in Windows media format to show you what I mean. It's only around 800k. http://www.bedingfield.org.uk/nena.wmv

Many thanks
Karl

looks to me very much like a field dominance issue, two possibilites:

a) your editing programme has been set to record upper field first (its usually lower field first)

or

b) your editing programme captures both fields similtaniously and sorts them out in the render

depending on the level of software you use you can change this, final cut & premiere etc let you change it, basic pinnacle and ulead etc wont.

If it's fine on the output then you might want to live with it, there are two other options available, but I don't think your camera will support them

1) record in 'frame' or 'progessive' mode (even on prosumer sonys this means a reduced frame rate and affected motion, it's work on canons or panasonics with progressive scan)

2) reduce the shutter speed (as low as 1/50th second pal, 1/60th NTSC) this means that the difference in the subjects movement between each scan is less pronounced, as a bonus the slight motion blur will increase the illusion of movement. On your cam it is probably going to be a case of switching the auto shutter off.

Video cameras make two scans of the same image within one frame (each scan is called a field), this was designed to match the broadcast system where bandwith could be halved by sending two scans sequentially rather than one big scan.

The artefacts that tend to occour only really do so with fast moving subjects (if you look carefully at motor racing footage for example, it appears to strobe, this is because of a higher shutter speed used to avoid motion blur).