[dave movie make]

Hi All, I wonder if anyone can help or if you have experience of this type of problem.

I am trying to capture from my Mini-DV to my PC. The result is quite poor - the straight lines on scenes are jagged for example.

I am using firewire. My disk drive is large with lots of free space, and defragmented. I use msft movie maker to capture, using the DV-AVI option. This produces a 6GB .avi file for about 30 mins camcorder recording.

Nothing else is running on the computer. I've followed all the "better capture" tips - indexing is off, other applications and services are off, dma on, preview screen off during capture, no disk compression, etc etc. During the capture the cpu is not reaching 100% - as per the task manager reporting.

When I view the resultant .avi file - using windows media player for example - this is when I see the poor quality capture.

If I connect the camcorder direct to my tv and play the mini-dv tape, the quality is great. This is what I'm looking for in the capture to pc step.

Any ideas what could be going wrong. Is there anything to do with video compression or codecs or huffyuv (whatever that is) that could be causing this poor capture?

Regards,
Dave

[redsox_mark]

I would bet your capture is fine; the “jaggies” are due to the application playing the video (in this case WMP) not deinterlacing it correctly. Try playing it with VLC, but make sure you turn on deinterlacing (there are several methods, “bob” seems to work well).

[MarkE19]

I agree with Mark. the chances are that the capture is fine, just the software screwing up the playback.
Another way to proove if it is ok is to create a short DVD from the footage and play it back on the TV. If all looks ok then you know the capture is fine

Mark (another one ).

[senu]

Not another Mark .. but I agree with them FWIW

VLC can be found HERE
Another one is the GOM player found OVER HERE

[dave movie make]

Many thanks guys for all your answers.

This is getting more weird.

I've installed VLC. And I'm now trying to run the .avi files using it.

Recent .avi files "copied" from my SD card on my digital camera work fine. (ie. copied not captured.)

But the .avi files created from the msft movie maker capture step, from my mini-dv camcorder, give a VLC error message that the format is unrecognised. However, I can play these same .avi files in windows media player, and they also play in Real Player.

I wonder why VLC recognises some .avi files but not others....

On the deinterlacing topic - I'll try out making a DVD from the .avi captures that are "jaggy" and play that on the TV to see if the quality is similar to connecting the camcorder direct to the TV. I'll post the results here.

In the meantime, does the VLC not recognising those captured .avi files indicate there could be something else wrong with the .avi files - anything to do with codecs?

Regards, Dave.

[senu]

Im not sure why you have this problem
Try capturing from your camcorder with WINDV
and see
Do you have this issue with GOM player as well?

Saying that you may know that AVI is only a wrapper format which may contain video files derived from different codecs but the DV AVI codec is normally native to Windows.. unless it has become currupt
Another suggestion is to download, say Sony Vegas ( or movie studio) trial and see if you can get a proper download) with many of these programs, even uninstaling the program does not remove the codec ( if that is where the problem lies)

[dave movie make]

Thanks Senu. GOM has done the trick.

GOM will play the old camcorder AVI files, and the new digital camera AVI files. The deinterlacing looks excellent - I just used the defaults - much better than with msft media player.

I tried WINDV to do some capture tests, and that worked fine. But did not seem any better than msft movie maker, so I'll probably just use msft movie maker for the captures. And GOM to play the results.

I'll be trying out wmv conversion next. For youtube upload for example. And for some longer movies I'll be making it to a dvd using standard methods. But I'm feeling much better now in the knowledge that the original capturing is being done at best quality.

Thanks for help.

Regards, Dave.