terrible firewire quality - is it me or is it the camera?

Ok guys,recently I have been using my sony TRV330 digital8 camera to shoot some footage. The footage looks pretty good when played back on tv, but when I import it into my pc, using my firewire card....it looks all crappy and fuzzy, like you can kinda see moving dots of color and stuff. Now i have searched the online help for the program that came with the camera(MGi video wave III)
and the book that came with adobe premiere 6, and I can't find anyhting wrong here....
most of the time the quality is pretty much the same, however premiere looks a little worse for some reason...
Iv'e been importing them as 720x480 DV footage and thats the only compression I use on em.
Now is there something I'm missing here, or doing incorrectly? Or is it just the camera?
And I've heard the premiere 6.5 is made to be more suiited for DV input and such but I just can't get the upgrade yet , maybe in a few weeks
any opinions or special things you guys do to get your footage in nice?

Thank you all in advance

 

i'd like to also know the differences in between premiere 6.0 and 6.5. i need to know whether or not it's worth the upgrade

 

I don't think that was his question though AWB... But back on topic... How fast is your computer... is it possible that that might be the problem... Also your files may not be messed up.... It may be that the computer cannot read the uncompressed files fast enough to show the footage real time without frame dropping

 

I would have thought that but even if I just look at a still from the video its bad quality.
i got a 800mhz pIII, 768mb ram and a geforce 2GTS video card(sorry no model or make, cause built the pc myself 2 christmases ago )....I also kill all running apps in the backround before inporting just in case.... so, I dunno what to do here..

o yea...running win2k

 

One test you could do is to export some of your imported footage back to your camera and run that on a TV. On a good system, the footage should look identical to the source tape. If it looks just as bad on TV as it does on the computer, then you've got a problem.

 

hmm, I'll give that a try tomarrow. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Yeah. For me DV video displays rather poorly in QuickTime and Premiere but is fine when you're scubbing out to a monitor. Mine doesn't look as bad as yours souns... but if you export it to a different file type or open it in AE it should be fine. ...If it's just that display mumbo jumbo.

 

Yeah my footage always looks like crap when I play it back on the computer, but if you have a preview monitor hooked up or when you record back to tape it looks just as great as before.

 

Virtually 100% as great as before!

Also it seems to straighten up when you open the footage in After Effects.

Edit: Just noticed I mentioned that before. My bad.

 

Could we see a picture?

I dunno ... no direspect.... but in my experience, most of these threads on video BB's that are like "I just bought my first camera and captured oh it looks like **** on the computer" is a combination of

a) People never knowing or understanding Interlace video

b) People not realizing how *sharp* a computer monitor is compared to a TV, and how "unforgiving" that is to any "flaws" in the video (and how very "forgiving" the smeared mess of a TV is)

/Z

 

I don't think this applies to Premiere, but something I thought I would mention is that in QuickTime player DV often defaults to being displayed as a lower quality & deinterlaced image. This allows for smoother playback but the image itself will always remain in it's native quality for further processing.

To view it in higher quality, open the movie properties, go to video track > High Quality and click "High Quality Enabled." You can also choose to view the image deinterlaced or not by clicking the "Single Field" option. Again, these options are simply for viewing the video and don't effect how it's processed. iMovie has a similar option in it's preferences.

By the way Zap, try to lay off of the 4 letter words please.

 

Hey, that was a quote

/Z

 

Well, now it's more of a paraphrase, hehe.

 

Master Zap, I dont think its the 1st reason that you mentioned, I kinda understand field orders, but i think you may all be right about my monitor not being as forgiving as my pc. I'll try exporting it back to tape today and seeing how it looks and I'll get back to you. thanks a lot guys!

 

If you still don't come up with an answer, and all of your computer-exported video is baddish colored (even for, say, an internet release), then try going to your project settings, then to advanced export options (or somesuch) and applying a median blur of 1-2 pixels. Should clean the spots right out, but the resolution will take a small hit. Oh well, but it would look better.

 

Another "gotcha" on PC's is that Microsofts Media Player defaults, for some obscure reason, to display (and decode) DV at half resolution... you have to go into some obscure "properties" thingamajig and generally kick stuff around to get it to behave and remember the proper setting. On my Win2K installation you *cant* get it to behave and have to do the setting every time. *sigh*

If we could see a framegrab of what you see maybe we could help. I'm not claiming you are "simply" seeing interlace or anything, you are far too intelligent for that I was just making a general observation

/Z

/Z

 

ok guys, I jsut got home from school, but i have to goto work soon so I cant try the exporting to my camera thing yet *but* I did get a screen grab of the straight unedited Dv format captured video. (and I did set the option to high quality after you mentioned it Master zap, but there was only a subtle change) Its pictured at 100% and is a 720x480 video

its the link on the bottem of my page
http://admiral.ant.web1000.com/

thanks again all, and I'll be back soon to try exporting it to my camera.

o yeah, and is it possible that my camera just cant record things at a res of 720x480? so when I capture at that high of a res, it looks bad? just a thought....

 

Well, if you shot that in broad daylight then you've got problems, hehe. It looks like the lack of light caused the auto exposure on the camera to go way up which exposes a lot of video noise.

I have a hunch that when you export the DV back to tape it will look the same as the source tape. As others have hinted at, computer monitors show all the nasty imperfections that NTSC TVs have and somehow manage to disguise. I think this is what you are experiencing.

 

yea, in retrospect, I've noticed that most of the shots that look bad are night....hmm... *looks around feeling REALLY stupid, then runs*

 

well guys, I tried getting some more footage, taken with adequate lighting and it looks pretty decent...i dont know how I didnt make the coneection between my day footage and my night footage having different levels of quality, I immedaitly thoguht I had done something wrong on the night footage..hehe ahwell
thanks for all your suggestion and help guys
*Admiral_Ant crawls back into his cave*

 

So how does the footage look after exporting it back to tape?

 

Yes...it's definately a lighting problem. When it comes to DV, light can be your best friend or your enemy.

 

it looks the same as it started when I export it, I guess I'll just rely on post to darken scenes