I have a problem with the quality of recordings from my Canon MV 450i. I have tried 2 methods: 1) Using Windows Movie to record direct from camera via firewire. The playback on the PC was very poor, fuzzy etc. I burnt a DVD and played on my TV - still same and much worse than original when I linked camera direct to TV. Got around the problem by recording direct to a DVD using my new Video recorder which has an internal hard drive + DVD burner but can't do much editing with it! 2) Tried using the software that came with camera - Digital Origin IntroDV. The picture clarity is as good as camera BUT on playback it is not as smooth - appears to be slightly jerky as if it were made of 1000's of single frames. Apart from saving family hols to DVD I need to record short clips for Powerpoint Presentations so do need good quality off my hard drive. Camera was set at default (standard play 12bit)for all recodings. PC has XP Home 2002, 512MB RAM, Caleron CPU 2.2GHz
If you've got a few bucks (99) try Pinnacle 10 0r 11 you can make and edit your movies pretty well. I never got Windows movie maker to work right so I use Pinnacle 10.5
