Hi,

I'm capturing from mini dv (PAL - United Kingdom) into Adobe Premiere 6 via IEEE/1394 firewire. The results are pretty poor (using 'Microsoft DV-PAL' compression). I seem to get quite a bit of unacceptable shimmering pixelation along the edges of things. The source footage looks a lot better than the stuff I see once captured into premiere.

Someone suggested the solution is to "capture and edit uncompressed". I cannot quite see how to set this up in Premiere 6. Can anyone help? This is what I've tried...

Premiere only seems to offer the option for no compression when I change the 'editing mode' to 'Video for windows' instead of 'DV Playback'. But if I do this, I get the message 'unable to connect to capture driver' and can therefore not capture anything.

If I leave the editing mode at 'DV Playback', I can capture fine over firewire, but I only get the limited compression options of 'Microsoft DV-PAL' and 'Microsoft DV-NTSC'. Which seem to result in fairly crappy output.

Strangely, it seems straightforward to output uncompressed files from Premiere 6, which makes me think there must be a way of capturing uncompressed?

Can anyone offer any advice? Do I need a different NLE to capture and edit uncompressed? Or is there any other way to improve the capture quality?

The output is intended for DVD and subsequent large scale video projection, so I need to get the best quality possible. At the moment, I wouldn't even be happy to project the raw captured files at their existing quality, let alone what may come out after compressing to MPEG2 for DVD.

Many thanks.

In theory, transferring via firewire creates an exact copy. You could try using an alternative DV codec (Panason, canopus).

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I've never had a problem capturing using the microsoft DV codedc and can achieve broadcast quality results using this codec.

Is the shimmering on your footage more noticable in fast pans/fast motion? If this is the case the shimmer maybe interlace artefacts which will go away once you view your footage on a TV. Also remember that the monitor window in premier does not show the full quality image. Try out-putting some footage back to your DV camera and watch it on your telly - the shimmer may not appear.

When you capture DV using firewire no compression is used, the codec is merely a "wrapper" for the raw data. You could use a different codec as Marc suggests but I dont think your problem lies here - the difference in quaility between these codecs is hardly noticable although some of them render/encode faster than MS DV.

tonga

tongachutt - you were indeed right. I output straight back to tape and looked at it on a TV - there was no noticable difference between this footage and the source footage, which was a great relief. So it does indeed seem to be interlace artefacts and how these are displayed on a computer monitor.

But one further question - does anyone know of any kind of media player that can successfully emulate a TV display (PAL). This would be useful for two reasons - 1) I could at least preview what I'm going to get on my desktop and 2) sometimes I play direct from my PC (using media player) to a data projector - but this obviously still shows the pixelated artefacts.

Many thanks for your invaulable help.

A PC monitor cant emulate a TV, it cant interlace frames. To get a true picture you need a tv plugged into a graphics card that supports tv out as well as monitor out.

If your film is for PC playback deinterlace your footage at the render stage.

tonga