Hi,
I own a SONY DCR-TRV340E. I am very happy with the picture quality of the images shot. But when I transfer my movie from my digital8 tape to my PC there is a deterioration of the picture quality. The picture become grainy and boxes appear and the picture is not as sharp and glassy as it was on the digital8 tape. Is there a way to get my movies copied to my PC faithfully without having even a bit of picture loss.

Thanks a lot
Subrata_dg

[MarkE19]

Try stopping all other programmes that are running such as antivirus. A good programme for this is EndItAll. Do a search from Google etc to find it. It is a free download.
Make sure you have plenty of spare disk space. DV will take around 1Gb of disk space for every 4 minutes captured. Also defragment the disk.
In an ideal world you would also be capturing to a dedicated disk with no programmes on it.
Make sure the DMA is enabled for your disk.

Try the above and let us know if this does not help.

Mark.

[MarkE19]

Another thing.....

the pictures that you see on a PC monitor will always look to be poor compared to a TV as the monitor is not designed to show full motion/resolution video.

Mark.

[TommyVecetti]

Make sure you are using firewire as well.

Originally posted by Subrata_dg
Hi,
I own a SONY DCR-TRV340E. I am very happy with the picture quality of the images shot. But when I transfer my movie from my digital8 tape to my PC there is a deterioration of the picture quality. The picture become grainy and boxes appear and the picture is not as sharp and glassy as it was on the digital8 tape. Is there a way to get my movies copied to my PC faithfully without having even a bit of picture loss.

Thanks a lot
Subrata_dg

Hi,
I have tried transfering my movies in the following two ways.

1) Using Pinnacle MP20 (if I remember correctly) video capture card on a pentium 3 500 mhz machine. The mpeg captured and stored comes to about 600mb for an hour movie. The motion is smooth but the picture becomes grainy and there is distortion of colour.
2) Using the USB cable provided. In this case an hours' movie captured comes to around 2.5GB. Here the motion is not very smooth and the picture is not as sharp and glassy as it is when played back from the digital8 tape. Another problem is how do I convert this 2.5GB to one vcd.

Thanks a lot for your advice and support.
Subrata

[MarkE19]

The only way to get the best quality capture is to use a firewire port. Not all PC's will have a firewire port, but these can be installed into any PCI slot on the motherboard and will cost around £20 just for the card and lead to connect to camcorder. As you have USB I know you must be running at least Windows98SE so the card will be recognised by Windows.
To copy the video to VCD you need to convert the file to MPEG-1 and then copy to CD-R useing the likes of Nero to create a video CD. This conversion can be done within the editing software you use (well should be!).

Mark.