I have just purchased a Sony HC38 and have begun to capture the video. I'm using the firewire cable and windv. On the camera and in windv the video looks fine but when I view it in vlc or any other video player it has small lines around the edge of objects whenever there is a contrast. Its most noticeable with motion. For example if a person is in front of a white wall and wearing dark colors there is a bit of lines at the edges of the person. If that person is walking the lines become bigger and more pronounced. It seems to be an issue with the capture but I've applied the XP firewire patch, my computer is plenty fast and there are no other processes running beyond just windows. Windv lists 0 dropped frames. Any suggestions are appreciated.
It's a resolution issue. Not much you can do about it since anything lower than the Sony HC9x will have the same problems. However, here are some hints: 1) Make sure you're recording on SP, not LP. 2) I don't use WinDV but make sure you're recording in DV-AVI and using a GOOD encoder to encode to MPEG2. And, using a HDD/DVD based camcorder will not help.
I don't think it has anything to do with reolution or the qulity of your video. I think that what you are describing is the effect of interlacing. Don't worry about it; DV-AVI is just not a very suitable format for playback on a PC monitor. Do whatever you wnat to do with the files on your PC (editing and stuff) and once you are done convert it to the format that is approriate for you end use. Fo play back on a PC a format like wmv or DivX are good choices.
Thanks for the info. I am using SP and I have not encoded to anything yet so I don't think its the quality of the recording or the mpeg encoder. And I would hate to think that all cameras in this price range do this. Surely somebody would have mentioned this somewhere on here when I was doing my research. I will encode to a couple of formats and test it out. MPEG2 for the DVD and check it out there and divx to see how it looks on the pc. I'll update when I do. Thanks
