[turbo1]

hi there i have tried for the first time to put a mini dv tape on to a video cd with my computer.
after a few attempts i got it to work however i would consider the quality a good bit short of the origonal,is this normal or have i done something wrong.
can u maintain the quality on the transfer.
thanks j.

[Snubtray]

It depends in part on what you are doing, but Video CD is low in quality compared to DVD. Your source DV is better than DVD and this in turn is much better than SVCD or VCD.

Are you transferring the source video to a CD or to a DVD? If the latter, make sure that the setting on your software is to DVD quality.

[MarkE19]

As already mentioned a VCD has a much lower quality than DVD, which is also lower than the footage on a DV tape. A SVCD should get quality fairly close to that of a DVD, but you will only get around 15 minutes of video onto the CD so not ideal. Add to that the fact that many DVD players wont play SVCD discs.
If you want to create discs to watch on a TV then I would recommend getting yourself a DVD recorder for the PC as they can be bought now for around £30 and the blank discs are well under £1 each. This is the only real way to do the footage you have justice.

As long as you capture the video via firewire as an .AVI file then there will be no loss of quality at this stage. A good DVD authoring program will be able to give you very good results from the .AVI files that should look almost as good as the origional DV footage played direct from the camcorder - even on a large PJ screen etc.

Mark.