| TraderAlex |
I have long experience working with digitial still pictures on the pc, but I am a first-timer, upstreaming taped video from my Handycam to the PC for editing w/ a video editor, and then burning to a DVD. The quality of the video, that I am getting, is poor, looks pastel-like, old time internet video streaming.. I have not been able to trouble shoot why-and various hardware and software tech support reps have no answers. These are the details
Camera-Is a Sony DCR-PC350 Handycam. The camera is set to its best resolution. USB video streaming is selected. Set for NTSC and 4:3. I am using the Sony-supplied video USB cable, which connected in the rear, directly to the motherboard, as Sony suggested.
PC-is a Dell Dimension 8300 Pent 4, at 2.8 GHz,
2 gigabytes of RAM installed. The video card is
an NVidia GForce FX 5200 128mb DDR.
DVD Burner-Using the external Sony DRX-830U. Using included Nero Vison software to burn the video file to disk.
I bought the Adobe Premier Elements 4 video editing software, but have found their tech support so poor (the tech started advising me on Elements, and then midstream same conversation, starting giving me advice for Photoshop.....), that I am returning it. I have ordered the Sony Vegas 8 software, assuming it will integrate better with Sony hardware.
I have tried working both with the Adobe program and Windows Movie maker. The playback of the video from hard drive seems very low resolution, a little jerky, pastel-like appearance with a lot of .jpg-like artifacts seen. Same result playing the video file with Windows Media player, as a windows media file. Once the image is expanded to full screen, video quality is very poor. Sound quality, however, in all cases is just fine.
I have tested the Handycam by uploading the video from the tape to a Panasonic home entertainment dvd player/recorder that we have. Connection from the camera was made using the a/v cord and S-video. In this case, the image recorded to the Pansonic player's hard drive is just fine. And I presume when I burn the video to disk on the Panasonic, it will be fine.
Neither Sony nor Adobe had any real, helpful advice, why the video quality is poor, after uploading to the PC. I asked Sony whether using a Firewire cord and card would help-and they said that would not do anything to improve video quality, only transfer speed. The Sony thought it sounded like it must be software related (both Windows Movie Maker and Adobe?).
Sorry for this being kind of longish. Can anybody advise what is the cause of poor video
quality, and what do I need to fix/do/get, in order to get this working the way it should?
Thanks |
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| phins2rt |
| Maybe you have a bad usb cable? It sounds like the second connection (s-video) works fine. Maybe swap out the usb cable and see if that fixes it. Is the usb cable generic or sony specific? Good luck. |
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| Randy B |
I have been doing this for a few years, and I can tell you your hardware is just barely in the realm, and the software is not the greatest choice. The main problem is the cable choice for uploading. You are takeing wide bandwdth digital imaging and converting to analog through the S-Video and now converting back to digital on the software. Firewire (I394) is the way to accomplish a direct digital upload with wide bandwidth. The software upgrade will also make a difference. I upload with a firewire from a Sony DCR-HC96. I use Pinnacle Studio 10x now. I started with 8x. Your rendering time must be long and with quite a few slide drops. A dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM and at least a 256 video card (I use an Nvidia 8800gt OC with 512mb) will really make a difference.
If you are using IDE hard drives and the S-Video, you will eventually burnout the IDE controller on the motherboard and or have a hard drive failure due to long rendering times.
Good Luck,
Randy B |
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| TraderAlex |
I suspected that USB transfer might be the problem. But what killed me is that I asked that specific question Sony Tech Support: their reply was that firewire vs. usb was only a matter of transfer speed, no quality impact.....geez, thanks for that advice.
I don't konw if it pays to change out the video card on this PC, as I am probably due for a change. But another PC in the house does have an NVidia 256mb card, but I think I will need to get firewire for both. I have Duo Core on my new laptop, and can add firewire through the PCI port. That may be my quickest solution, for the time being.
Regarding the S-Video concern you mentioned-that's only for the Panasonic player/recorder (home entertainment). I presume it was made for that purpose, so I should not have any risk with equipment damage by doing some transfers from camera to that device? Thanks for your reply. Big help to me. |
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| TraderAlex |
I checked in DXDIAG, in my laptop. I have the NVidia Quadro NVS 140M, with 512mb of memory. So it looks like, for time being, I should probabably get myself a PCI firewire port, and do my editing on the laptop, till such time I order the next desktop. Only problem is that I did not order the lap top with a large capacity hardrive-went for speed, over capacity. How much hd space does a 1 hour Sony DV tape use up on HD, upon transfer? Most likely won't be able to accumulate my uploads, there.
Thanks/ |
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| ronf119 |
| definitely use firewire to do the transfer. since you are on the pc side of editing, window movie maker is pretty simple to use and free. however, it is limited to what it can do. Pinnacle Studio is an upgrade from that as well as Adobe Premiere Elements. I use Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid for my editing which is probably overkill for your needs and does have a learning curve to them. If you are on the Mac side, iMovie works quite well. Final Cut is great if you really get into editing. Remember to have plenty of hard disk space. From miniDV to hard disk, you are looking at around 2gb for every 9min of raw footage. |
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| ronf119 |
Your desktop should do fine for video editing but of course the more cpu power you have, the faster the rendering times and less lag. I would say to look at the combination of cpu, then hard drive and ram, then video card. You don't necessarily need to have a high-end video card to edit. On one of my backup editing systems at home, I still have a matrox dual head 32mb video card supporting 2 monitors and haven't had any big issues with it. Looking at both of your systems, overall your laptop seems to be the better of the 2 assuming you also have 2gb of ram. The only issue is hard drive capacity. You could look into an external Firewire HD but that may become your bottle neck because of the hard drive speed itself.
I did run into an issue in the past of putting in a pc card firewire on a laptop with no firewire port. The camera would loose connection or drop frames when I was transferring. I think it had to do with the bus speed of pc card slot but i didn't do enough diagnosis to figure it out. I ended up just copying over the files and moving to another laptop that had firewire built in as I was working with a deadline
if you need any further help, PM me |
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| jhue |
I'm not familiar with that particular model of Sony MiniDV camcorder you have, but if it's like the others from Sony that I've seen, video transfers over USB are limited to fairly low-quality 320x240. You have to use Firewire to get the native DV video transferred (720 x 480). That's why the video transferred over USB is such low quality.
As ronf119 wrote, the video card is the least important component of your system. For the editing applications you are using, there is very little use of the GPU. For the most part it's only when you are using something like Adobe After Effects and can take advantage of hardware accelerated rendering effects that the video card really makes a difference. What's probably more important for someone using the consumer-level apps is having a lot of screen real-estate.
A big piece of the processing time for your edits is going to be the encoding of video (i.e. MPEG-2 encoding for DVD output) during final export. As ronf119 wrote, a fast CPU will really help speed this step in rendering. Any Core 2 CPU and 2GB of RAM is a good place to start, along with a large-capacity 7200rpm hard drive. |
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| TraderAlex |
Yes, and also what ronf has said, this does look like the lack of the firewire is going to be the primary culprit. My laptop (my most recent computing edition) is equipped with a duo core processor, 7200 rpm drive, and a 512mb video card. It lacks a built in fire, but I am going to buy a PCI port for that purpose. Anyway, I tried upstreaming the Sony video to the laptop, using the same USB connection, and Windows Movie Maker as the capture software.
The video quality was still poor. What I did notice this time, in response to one of Ronf's comments, was that for 25 minutes of video play, the captured file size was only about 85mb.......which seems to be only a tiny fraction of what it should be. The laptop, right now, seems to be the best equipped for video editing. Its hard drive is not huge, so I guess I will have to transfer long files to dvd for storage. But I will go out and get a PCI firewire card for it. It does not seem to make much sense to spend money to upgrade the video card and add firewire to the Dell 8300 desktop. Better off just replacing it, later this year. |
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| Randy B |
I agree with all comments. I run dual DV 22 inch monitors, so the 512mb is a necessity for me. The PCI to firewire may still limit you on the laptop. AS it it is only as fast as the BUS speed on the port. If you are thinking of getting a new desktop, get the firewire installed there. The CPU, ram and hard drive size are the primary concerns. I am using a QC6600 with a 8mb LCache, with 3gb or RAM and a couple of 500 mb SATA 7200 RPM HDD. This makes rendering extremely efficient in raw DV to MPEG 2. The Sony I have while not HD, does do widescreeen format, and the pixelation is very good.
The S-Video from the VCR will work fine as you stated. You can only get so much bandwidth from a VHS or Bet-max with a Dazzle type USB plug.
Good luck with the editing. I know once I was able to make the tapes of the kids and send them to my parents they loved it.
Randy B |
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| jhue |
quote:
Originally posted by TraderAlex
What I did notice this time, in response to one of Ronf's comments, was that for 25 minutes of video play, the captured file size was only about 85mb.......which seems to be only a tiny fraction of what it should be.
MiniDV should be about 13GB per hour, or about 3.5Mbytes/sec. So yeah, what you transferred over via USB wasn't what was recorded on tape.
I've got a company-issued Lenovo Thinkpad T61 w/a Core 2 Duo T7500@2.2GHz, 2GB RAM and built-in Firewire and it's usable (though not optimal) for video editing w/Premiere Elements. A second internal SATA drive would help things. |
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| TraderAlex |
| I have the exact same laptop and config, but w/o built in firewire. I did not even see that offered, when I selected options for the build. |
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| jhue |
My config is a company standard so I didn't customize it at all.
In the front left corner, on the front edge right next to the on/off switch for wireless, there is a tiny port labeled "1394". That's the Firewire. You don't have that??? The model # of my T61 is 7665-AC1 .
If you don't have this, you need a Cardbus Firewire card, or possibly an Expresscard Firewire card. I believe all T61s have one Cardbus slot, but not all have an Expresscard slot. |
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| TraderAlex |
| I had called Lenovo, prior to your post, to ask whether my T61 was configured with Firewire? He got off line for a minute or two, then came back and said "no", and did not even know where one would fit, and suggested I get the PCI card. But after reading your post, I am looking at the left-side edge of mine. It may sound silly, but I have not looked closely at the left edge, but, there is no embossment of the number "1394" that I can see. Immediately to the left of the PC card port, I see what looks like a third, USB port (which I did not realize was there). And then inbetween the RJ45 jack and the microphone chance is a tiny, little rectangle port, which has a symbol above it, that looks like a pryamid of three boxes. Is that it? Thanks. |
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| TraderAlex |
Well, I called Lenovo. It ws rather frustrating. My T61 also has the 512mb NVidia video card, but I ordered with standard 14.1 inch, not wide screen. Everyone seemed to agree, at first, that I should have had a 1394 port. But tech support referred me back to sales to fix the problem, and sales said it was warranty support's work to take care of the problem. That went back and forth between the two departments for a while, this afternoon. Then it came up, that since I did not notice the missing port within the first 21 days, I could not return it (my invoice date was Dec 15, 2007). On the other hand-I have a four year warranty: broken or missing the part-wouldn't that be the same issue, really? Then they said that my particular T61 model (an 8991-CT0) did not come with firewire. The end of the story, did not know what truth was, and the sales agent drawn in the middle did not really know what to say either. Ok, I have a warranty, and maybe the they did build my order wrong at the factory-but they were not going to stand behind the product they sold me, and fix it..... So I am going to have to buy the adapter. It looks like the Express Card is the best way to go, vs. Card Bus, for the 1394. Seems like the Express Card will yield a much higher rate of data transfer? Do I have this right? Is that the correct choice?
Thanks./ |
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| jhue |
DV video is only 27-28Mbits/sec, so you're limited by that, not by the speed of any of the buses or interfaces, which are all many times faster. Your camcorder can only transfer at 1x speed, one hour of recorded tape takes one hour to transfer.
Cardbus or ExpressCard doesn't matter, just make sure that what you get is compatible with your system. There are many different configurations of the T61 wrt expansion cards, and some don't have an ExpressCard slot. |
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| TraderAlex |
| Thanks, what you write makes sense to me. I am all new to video editing, previous years is experience editing stills Yes, my T61 has the combination Card Bus/Express Card slot. That combo feature was an add-on option for about $20 or so. |
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