I have a Sony Digital8 HandyCam (DCR-TRV280) and I am looking to get the best quality in a project I am doing out of it. What do you guys suggest for a way to transfer video from the camera to my computer? I am currently using USB 2.0 and capturing it via Vegas' capture software that comes along with Vegas. I have yet to figure out how to render a really good quality video with my current set up. Half of me is wondering if it is the capture software and the other half wonders if it is the format I have used to render it. I have a good sized computer so that should not be an issue. So, my questions are:

How should I transfer video from my camera to my computer? Is Firewire better than USB 2.0?

What format and settings for the format should I use to render a DVD quality video?

Let Me Know,

Gruhn

Firewire.Firewire. Firewire..... always Firewire if you have the choice. What format have you rendered to so far thats disappointing you?.

VirtualDub is a GREAT (and free!) program for capturing and compressing video. You can get the source code at http://virtualdub.org. It can also render parts of video, so you dont have to keep the parts that you don't want, which can be very useful when you get to the editing stage of your video. Now, I reccomend a codec called Huffyuv, I don't know where it is located on the web, but it is easy to find. All you have to do is Google it, and I'm sure it will come up. This codec is a lossless codec, which means you will lose NO quality whatsoever. Pretty sweet huh? But there is a catch, it eats up your harddrive like a mofo. So if you have a lot of space, I reccomend the above. If you don't have a lot of space, just use wmv compression. Get Windows Media Encoder, or im sure that your video editing program has a compression export option similar to that. Hope that helps.

Cool - I thought DV AVI was the best & lossless.

If you render something to dv then re import, render again, after 4 or 5 times round (sometimes less) you can see a loss in quality. The clour res gets worse and nasty effects occur on saturated edges.

I do use huff sometimes to avoid this when I am reimporting an edit. I sometimes make a master render in huff and then make different versions, wmv, dv, mpeg from the master.

I have to say tho that if you are really piccy that there is a very slight softening with huff as compared to uncompressed video but uncompressed is just too huge for us mere mortals without racks of drive space.

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