Pana sdr-h30 - Shocking Image Quality - Help needed please

Erolb

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I am a newbie when it comes to all things DV, who needs help. The video files from my Panasonic sdr-h30 are all over saturated (my daughter is a red head and on her sports day vid the contrast between her hair and the green grass was vomit inducing :eek:), heavily anti-aliased on diagonal lines and also the picture format seems too tall. Wide rooms look narrow and people look too tall.
Have checked on the TFT computer monitor and the Panasonic LCD in the lounge. The weirdest thing was that when I played a DVD with footage from the cam on my mum's CRT the picture was flawless.

Could anyone please help with:

-What I need to do to correct the picture aspect
-The shocking pixelation and horizontal tearing when somethign moves on the screen.

Any help greatly appreciated.
 
You don't mention how you are viewing the footage (connections).Have you checked the AV output settings on the cam match the selected input on the monitor ? if these are ok then it may be a fault with the AV output on the cam.
If the DVD footage is ok then it's not a recording fault.
 
Good points!

When viewed on the PC, I have just dumped the movie files directly from the camera's hard drive. They are in some obscure format which I can't remember, I simply rename them .mpg and I can view them in WMP or VLC. Even in the original file format they are still badly rendered.

The files are then moved to DVD using Nero Vision Express. DVD on LCD TV still looks bad, this is on a Sony up-scaling player with HDMI.

Is there an app which can correct the picture format?

Thanks for responding.
 
also the picture format seems too tall. Wide rooms look narrow and people look too tall.

I can't find any record of a SDR-H30 model ever having existed but according to the Panasonic UK website the H40 has 16:9 and 4:3 modes (for both video and stills it would appear) - perhaps you need to check the aspect ratio in the settings menu - do you still have the manual (if not it's on the website)? Is your mum's TV 4:3 (which could explain why it looks normal)? Or perhaps her DVD player is set to output in 4:3. Could be something along those lines.
 
Rooms looking narrower than expected and people looking taller (and skinnier!) than expected, as reported by the OP, are symptoms of a 16x9 picture squeezed into a 4x3 aspect ratio. Sounds to me like whatever software the OP's using to import the clips is assuming (perhaps because of settings in preferences, for example) that it is ingesting 4x3 video, whereas 16x9 is what has been recorded.

Check your preference pane?

Andrew.
 
I can't find any record of a SDR-H30 model ever having existed but according to the Panasonic UK website the H40 has 16:9 and 4:3 modes (for both video and stills it would appear) - perhaps you need to check the aspect ratio in the settings menu - do you still have the manual (if not it's on the website)? Is your mum's TV 4:3 (which could explain why it looks normal)? Or perhaps her DVD player is set to output in 4:3. Could be something along those lines.

You're right Mr Lazy. My mistake, it's the SDR-H20 but it's a 30GB model which is what threw me.

Just checked and it was in 4:3, changed it to 16:9 and the menu and picture filled up the camera's LCD display rather than just being squashed in the centre.

I'll do some test filming, export the files and report back.

Many thanks for all who have chipped in so far. :clap:
 

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