If anyone can point me in the right direction I would be greatful.

I have a JVC GR D200EK DV camcorder and have filled numerous tapes and I now want to transfer these onto a DVD.

I have bought a 4 port PCI firewire card and lead and have installed it into my pc. I have captured some of the date from the tapes onto the pc and tried a bit of (amateurish!!) editing, I have even burnt onto a DVD .

The problem is the quality of the recording, it is no way as sharp on playback as when I plug the camcorder straight into the TV - is this normal, I was under the impression that there would be no loss in quality when using the firewire setup : .

Any ideas??

Its not the Firewire thats the problem (Assuming you captured in DV-AVI format). Its more likely to be the settings you used in encoding your edited video to DVD compliant MPEG2.

The best setting for this is to set your Video bit rate to 8000Kpbs. This will get you about an hour of video onto a standard DVD.

Let us know what software you are using if you need any additional assistance.


Meantime, good luck

__________________
IBM A51p with 160Gb Boot Disk, 160Gb external Firewire Disk, 2Gb Memory and a super duper sound card, 17\" TFT Monitor etc etc etc
Sony TRV33e : Sony TRV310e : Canon XM2
ULead products mostly including Mediastudio Pro (V8.0), Video Studio 8, Movie Factory 2.0, Premiere Elements

Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.

like jammy says, it all depends on the encoding settings. What settings did you use? How long a video did you try to burn onto dvd?

I assume the dvd was viewed on a tv, not the pc?

before you burnt to dvd, did you view the project? was the quality ok then?

__________________
AMD Athlon 1700 (@2200mhz from 1466 sod the noise!) - 768mb pc3200 - 200GB Maxtor - Pioneer 106 - GF4 Ti4200 - twinhan/visionplus pci dvb-t - random pci analogue tv tuner - A7v600-x (to replace the a7n8x-d that died...) - random 17\" CRT
Sony STR-DE425 & Eltax c205s;
xBox w/20GB HDD- executer 2.3b;
xBox - standard;
Konica/Minolta dimage z10 w/2x512mb SD;
iRiver h340;
A silly amount of Cat-5 and usb cables

Thanks for your tips, I have been using software that came with the burner (as I said I am a novice ) the capture rate was very low and I couldn't see any options to increase it.

Therefore I have had a look through some of the posts on the forum and will go and buy either ulead or pinnacle - which would you recommend? or is there any other brand I should go for?

Cheers

Try the trial versions from the manufacturers Websites, or from the cover disks on magazines, and try them out for yourself. See which one suits your needs.

Good luck

__________________
IBM A51p with 160Gb Boot Disk, 160Gb external Firewire Disk, 2Gb Memory and a super duper sound card, 17\" TFT Monitor etc etc etc
Sony TRV33e : Sony TRV310e : Canon XM2
ULead products mostly including Mediastudio Pro (V8.0), Video Studio 8, Movie Factory 2.0, Premiere Elements

Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.