video capture worse with firewire than USB !!

valeriesmith · #1 (**permalink**) 01-25-2005, 01:30 PM

Hello
I've been using a USB cable to capture video from a Panasonic NVGS400b to my new high spec PC onto MovieMaker2. I wasn't happy with the quality of the footage and got myself a firewire cable at the weekend (as advised on earlier topic). I also bought Pinnacle Studio 9 (Plus) whilst up Tottenham Court Road. I've captured the same footage from the camcorder via the firewire onto Studio 9, and the quality is worse. I'm getting a kind of pixilated effect around some edges within the picture. Somebody told me I need to split my hard drive - I've got 250 GB - which I'll need to have to ring the nice people at Dell to find out out how to do that. Could that be causing the problem with Studio 9 - or might I have a problem with the firewire? There's so much to learn in this game..... Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

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Mike Thorpe · #2 (**permalink**) 01-25-2005, 02:19 PM

Hi Valerie,

By "splitting" i'm assuming they mean partitioning, which won't really have any increase on the access speed, because it's still reading from the same device. What you might want to try is defragmenting (if you're using windows XP, that's:

Starts
All Programs
Accessories
System tools
Disk Defragmenter

give that a go first, and keep us updated.

valeriesmith · #3 (**permalink**) 01-25-2005, 02:31 PM

Thanks Mike - they did say 'partition' the harddrive (I'm still learning the lingo!). I've only had the PC a couple of months, but I'll give defragmenting a go this evening when I get home.

canadiain · #4 (**permalink**) 01-25-2005, 07:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by valeriesmith

I've captured the same footage from the camcorder via the firewire onto Studio 9, and the quality is worse.
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Sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure if it has anything to do with firewire vs USB. It could be that the pixelation is due to the software automatically converting from the raw AVI format to a compressed MPEG format as it captures the data. Sometimes its a bit overzealous about the compression, resulting in the blockness, so you might want to check what the software is trying to do with the clip as it "downloads" it. Could be that the software is doing different things depending if its connected by USB or IEEE??

I had a similar problem with blockness, and changing software and sticking to the uncompressed avi format helped a lot.

valeriesmith · #5 (**permalink**) 01-27-2005, 11:04 AM

I spoke to the man at Dell who told me that in order to partition my hard drive I need to back up everything I've saved and will lose everythign on the hard drive - meaning that I would have to reinstall absolutely everything - a daunting task and one that I'm not sure if it's necessary or not?

I've defragmented my computer and I've checked that the capture is AVI. In fact I did a test by capturing the video on all three options, including AVI and MPEG, and the pixelating still happened on all of them. The video appears to look fine in the small preview screen, but when I enlarge it to view it on the full size of my screen, the pixelation occurs.

Pinnacle suggested I download a patch, which I will do this evening. What's so annoying is that MovieMaker did a better job of capturing the video, but the featuers aren't as sophisticated as on Pinnacle.

By the way, I think this website is brilliant.

Marc Peters · #6 (**permalink**) 01-27-2005, 11:15 AM

Transferring via firewire from you camcorder to PC is lossless. You should not be seeing any artifacts whatsoever (unless those artifacts are on the original video, that is).

Could you download and install DVIO? This is a small application that just captures DV footage via firewire:

http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm

Quote:

I spoke to the man at Dell who told me that in order to partition my hard drive I need to back up everything I've saved and will lose everythign on the hard drive - meaning that I would have to reinstall absolutely everything - a daunting task and one that I'm not sure if it's necessary or not?

Tech support strike again. He's incorrect - in a way. Partitioning is destructive if you use FDISK, but third party applications are avialable to do this whilst maintaining your data (subject to the usual advice of backing up!) In your case though, partitioning won't help.

Alan Mills · #7 (**permalink**) 01-27-2005, 11:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by valeriesmith

I'm getting a kind of pixilated effect around some edges within the picture

Can you descibe what this looks like a little more? I'm just concerned that what you might be seeing is a standard interlacing effect. Are you seeing a sort of 'horoizontal comb teeth' effect at edges during movement?

If so then you have done nothing wrong. This is quite normal when viewed on a computer monitor.

Loads and loads more details on this issue on request if this is the issue.

Either way, I hope you sort things soon.

bgarthp · #8 (**permalink**) 01-27-2005, 12:13 PM

Not sure if this is your problem but it might explain the pixeling effect: I think I read somewhere that Pinnacle Studio 9 manages to provide a full-screen playback in realtime within the software by increasing the size of the window and decreasing the resolution. I'm not familiar with the software but if it does it this way you'll be seeing a relatively low-res full-screen preview.

Try exporting the project as full quality AVI and then playing it back in Windows Media Player, if it's still pixely then this isn't your problem. But it might be worth checking out.

Alan Mills · #9 (**permalink**) 01-27-2005, 02:15 PM

From an email I received from the original poster a short while ago it seesm this issue is, indeed, a question of watching interlaced video on a progressive scan monitor.

Chalk another one up to The Great Millsini

Marc Peters · #10 (**permalink**) 01-27-2005, 02:19 PM

Solution to this de-interlacing FAQ: get an interlaced picure. post it on the left with the words, "this is interlacing" on it and a link to one of these posts