Originally Posted by mhatkinson Hello, i have created a dvd using sonic which covered all aspects from transferring from camcorder to final disc,however i am not impressed,outside shots are fine but internal seem grainy and have a yellow/orange cast, my settings on camcorder are(gain off/agc/auto with a candle symbol) mostly indoor shots were taken with the last setting activated. which is best setting for indoor? |
Best settings for indoor you will probably find by trial and error. As the other poster said, there's a bit of an art to it. A few facts though - the less light there is, the more things are going to look "grainy" because the CCD has less information to work with and is effectively amplifying light. Just like high speed film (400 ASA) is grainier than slow film (100 ASA) because there is less light falling on the film grain (or by analogy the CCD) in a given amount of time that it is 'exposed'. Poor colours in low light conditions can be digitally corrected, and grain effects can be softened, but this is meticulous and boringly long to get right. The colour correction part isn't so bad, if you separate out the indoor shots that are a bit yellow you can make them better with filters that work on colour levels but this depends what software you have. A yellow tinge is normal by the way, because indoor incandescent bulbs are yellower than outdoor light.
Now after all that is said, the best way to get good colours is for your camera settings to be as good as they can at the outset, usually this is referred to as "white balance" which you need to set up before the shot. Doing it manually often has the best results, that's a case of trial and error. I don't know your particular camera model though so I can't help too much here. Have a look in the manual. If you don't have the manual or you're allergic to leafing through all that blahblah, then just try each of the preset settings in turn and you'll get used to the ones that work best in the different lighting conditions you're shooting in.
Originally Posted by mhatkinson And also can more expensive tapes help quality. |
This was true when you shot analogue VHS and S-VHS. Digital means the quality is the same whatever, tapes that are more expensive will just give less "dropouts" where the image could get jumpy after a couple of years storage in less than ideal conditions, or other stuff. I doubt image quality would be affected by better tapes, either the image is captured onto the tape or it isn't, in the digital world. Like with Sky Digital: move the dish and the image just gets jumpy then goes away - there's no snow like with old analogue satellite.
Originally Posted by mhatkinson Also is 60min of downloaded dv expected to only leave aprx 50mb of space on a 4.7gb dvd disc. |
DV takes up a lot of space; a 4.7Gb DVD holds just over an hour unless you change default compression from fixed to variable or look out for other quality settings (again the way these are labelled depends on the software you're using). You can get up to 2 hours on a 4.7Gb DVD but most films you see that are this long are on double that amount of space on a dual layer DVD. So yes about an hour is normal, but you can get very acceptable quality for a 2 hour film on a normal 4.7Gb DVD.
Originally Posted by mhatkinson Is sonic allright or nero 6 a better option, will nero create better finished results overall, what is mpeg4 and does any of the programs support it. sorry for so many requests but i only want to create good dvds. |
I don't have an opinion on the software you mention, perhaps others do, or have a look around at the many useful articles on the site and the archives of the forum. As for MPEG4, it is the standard used by DivX, XviD and a couple of other codecs that you will see around the net, DVD is MPEG2 by the way.
Hope this answers some of your questions.
creating dvd 
thanks Marc for your kind compliment.
Linear Mode
