Sony Camcorder mini DV downloaded to PC

[Bristles]

Hello, I would very much appreciate any help from the experts on this one. I am a complete novice, never done this before and do not understand all the jargon so please make it understandable for a fool. When I have downloaded a tape from a Sony Camcorder TRV 33 digital to my PC and play it back through Windows Media Player the image seems ok when it is not moving but as soon as the image starts to move, panning it seems all garbled, hazy and is not playing back smoothly. Please could anyone give me very simple step by step instructions as to what I should be doing and what am I doing wrong. Any help would be gratefully received. thanks in anticipation, B.

[rhubarbe]

You shouldn't pan. If you have to pan you should do it very very slowly. Better not to move the camcorder at all. What you are seeing is as a result of the inability of the cam to focus on anything as you are moving it too fast.

[Bristles]

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

You shouldn't pan. If you have to pan you should do it very very slowly. Better not to move the camcorder at all. What you are seeing is as a result of the inability of the cam to focus on anything as you are moving it too fast.

Thank you for your reply. I think that either you misunderstand me or I have not explained myself clearly. When recording on a camcorder the camcorder is moving slowly everywhere on whatever you want to record just as if you are watching ordinary programmes on tv. When I play back the recording on the tv it is perfect but when I download and watch it on my laptop it's cra*, fuzzy and not playing back as it does on the tv. Thanks, B

[rickyt]

Maybe the laptop does'nt meet the minimum specs for doing video work .Laptop hard drives dont run at 7200rpm like PC ones ,they run at 5400rpm , so there might be a problem there .Also , you do need a fair bit of RAM , so unless your laptop has a dedicated graphics card ,this maybe using some of your memmory. If you have lots of other things running in the background of your laptop .ie anti-virus ,anti-spyware and other's using resources ,this might also be a problem.
To be honest , I would'nt know what the minimum specs are for video editing on a laptop and have never heard of problems unless it's an old model . I have a very old Compaq Armada m300 I use for my accounts , it's ideal for typing letters and such but trying to play DVD through the external DVD player is a no-no and is so blocky it's unwatchable ,this is very low spec and would be the cause of poor picture quality .
You dont say what model of laptop you have .

[MarkE19]

How is the camcorder being connectede to the laptop? If by USB then that is probably the cause of the poor quality. Use firewire (aka iLink, DV port, ieee1394). If the laptop doesn't have firewire then you can add it via a PCMCIA/CardBus or ExpressCard card (depending on the cards your laptop supports - if either).

Mark.

[senu]

If you do have a fairly modern Laptop and are capturing by firewire.. I suggest you play the DV AVIs ( which they should be)
in
VLC
and try not to use a large window for playback

[dejongj]

And tick the box for deinterlaced play back, that might be explaining what you are experiencing....An interlaced picture sometimes doesn't look very good on computer screens....