Folks,

My wife and I have been given a Sony TRV50E Digital Camcorder and I have just started transferring video clips to my computer. I am rather disturbed, and disappointed, to see that the resolution is only 320 x 240 pixels. The camcorder manual appears to confirm that this is the resolution I should expect. I understood this to be a fairly high-end camcorder capable of providing an almost broadcast level of quality. When we playback our video clips via a television the quality seems to be broadly comparable to normal TV broadcasts. Am I being dense?

Thanks in advance,

Neil

Sorry to say it man, you're being dense, either you are saving the movie clips to the memory stick rather than DV tape or your capture settings are all wrong. What software are you using?.

The Sony TRV50 is a high quality camcorder, comparable with sonys present high end (single chip) offerings, so you should be getting good results.

I thought I was probably being dense :-)

I am not using the memory stick, I am downloading from tape via USB to the Pixelia application provided with the camera. Does this help?

Thanks for answering.

Neil

[shoehorn]

It'll be the USB that's the problem Neil.
You need Firewire to tranfer the footage from your Cam to you PC.
Take a look at the Camcorder FAQ sticky at the top, and / or do a search for Firewire.... it should explain it all......

[shoehorn]

Oh, by the way... this is an excellent forum, welcome....
Any questions you have, post away....
There are plenty of very helpful people on here.
Once you start on the PC editing route, you can get very involved and produce some "masterpieces"....
DVD's with menus and all sorts....

[MarkE19]

As shoehorn has already pointed out you will need to transfer your video via firewire to get the full quality. USB, either 1.1 or even 2.0, is not up to full quality video transfer.

If you have a fairly new PC then there is a fair chance that you will already have a firewire port on the MoBo. If not then you can add a PCI firewire card that should cost around £10 from an online retailer and will also include the cable to connect the camcorder to the card.
If running Windows XP then you will also have the software required to do the capture and editing. Movie Maker is part of XP and once you have the free upgrade to MM2 (part of SP2 now) then you have everything to get started. The only other software required is DVD authoring software if you will be recording the video on a DVD burner as this can't be done in MM2.
If not running XP then there are loads of good programs for around £50 or under from the likes of Pinnacle, Ulead etc. Many of these packages also include basic DVD authoring tools. You can download free trial versions of them from the relevant web sites.
Other than that all you will need is plenty of disk space as full quality video takes 1Gb of space for every 4 minutes captured , thats a massive 13Gb per hour! You will then need more space for the editing and any file conversion etc so you should have around double the space available that you need for the capture.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

Mark.