I recently got the JVC GR-275U and am was fairly horrified with the quality. The coloring is a bit off and the picture is pixilated. Here is my setup: I use a "geek squad" DV cable to get my video onto my PC I used Windows Movie Maker to extract the video to my PC I used a JVC MiniVD 60 ME cassett I recorded using Standard Play A user here (TPFKAS) was kind enough to let me know about Windows attempts to push you to WMV. http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/tutorials/moviemakermistakes.php I have since been using AVI as my format of choice but it still looks pretty poor on anything over a 15 inch monitor sized display. Again, since I am new to digital camcorders, I am not sure what to expect. Any thoughts on how to "test" if my camcorder is working right? Also, any thoughts on how to maximize the quality in general? Thanks in advance.
Hi TobyFrye, The reason why is stated in the referenced article that you should capture in DV-AVI is that this the best road towards creating a DVD from your movies (which is the road that probably 99% of the people are going tehse says). But, DV-AVI is not the best standard for viewing on the PC. The files are big and playing them on a PC takes a lot of dataflow per second which eats PC resources. Furthermore, it is interlaced which is also not very suitable for PC monitor viewing. By the way: you can notice quite some differences in quality when using different video players on your PC. So, if you actually want to keep the file on your PC for watching on your monitor, you better encode it to another format. In that case wmv is a good option, but for example also DivX. Although you will loose some quality it will look better on your PC monitor.
Hi, i am new to this video capturing thing. I have tried capturing my mini dv to my pc, but the video transfered was choppy. Is it due to the interlace thing that they are talking about. You have said that the avi file may look bad in PC. Will the video look better after i transfer it to VCD or DVD?
No, interlacing will show up as horizontal lines when viewed on a PC monitor, not choppy. If it is choppy, you either hhave done something wrong during capture, or you PC is old and does not have enough perfomance to play big video files.
