I have a SONY TR8000 camcorder which I am using to archive my old Hi8 tapes and Digital8 tapes onto DVD. I have purchased Dazzle DV Clip (Pinnace Studio Quick Start, Firewire Interface and cable). My PC is a HP Pavillion with 2.40-GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive and Artec 16x DVD writer.

I have a problem when playing back the DVDs. Although the DVDs will play back on my PC and our Panasonic DVD player, my SONY dav800 says "the disk is dirty". However, although the Panasonic and PC will play the DVD the movement is jerky. For example when we watch the children's sports day the children have very jerky movements as they run.

What is likely to be the cause of this problem? I am willing to spend more money as we have many hours of tape to archive and want the best quality we can. Is it likely to be camcorder, the hard disk, the firewire card/cable, the software, the DVD writer or the DVDs themselves (I have used Datawrite classics and Datawrite Reds?

Is the best solution just to buy a DVD recorder?

Thanks
pdahne

[MarkE19]

The chances are that it is a mix of the PC and software capabilities.
I assume that due to you only having a 40Gb HDD you are doing the DVD conversion in real time. If this is the case then you need a very powerful PC to handle real time MPEG-2 conversion. Also the MPEG-2 encoder needs to be good, but in most cases will still struggle.
To get the best results you need to capture to the HDD and then do the MPEG conversion, which will normally take far longer than real time. This will normally take around 14Gb per hour of footage for the capture and then more space for the conversion.
If you are captureing to the HDD first then it sounds like a settings problem. Do a search on this forum for 'DMA' as a giude to the possible problems.

Mark.

[MartinImber]

Try reversing the field order