Canon XL-H1 Standard Def - Component Out vs Firewire
 

I recently shot some material in SD @ 24 fps on my Canon XL-H1, and have noticed a large different in quality between watching the footage off the camera via component out and watching it once imported through firewire.

When I imported it through firewire with Final Cut it has some pretty bad interlacing, jagged edges, and just in general the quality is reduce quite a bit when exported to DVD.

Am I just imagining that the component out looks better? If not, is there some way to export via component out rather than firewire? Finally, is there anything I could be doing to improve the quality of the firewire imported footage?

Thanks
Luke

That doesn't compute; firewire is simply a transfer of digital information from the tape or camera to your computer; the analog outputs are conversions from that info. Might look at how your digital information is being translated to dvd first; if you are taking the hdv signal via firewire there is a compression to dvd, which is (unless Blu-Ray) a sd medium... /B Vaughan

Yes, it sounds to me like you are capturing with the wrong settings.

Footage from the firewire port is a 1:1 transfer.

The Firewire signal is HDV 4.2.0 color space. The HD-SDI out is 4.2.2 color space, so if you can capture the HD-SDI it would be a clean signal. It won't have any audio on the H1, not sure about the H1S.

Well the HD-SDI would only be 4:2:2 if you capture it live. If he is capturing from a tape through HD-SDi, it'll still be 4:2:0 within the 4:2:2 stream.

The H1S does have embedded audio in it's HD-SDI.

Luke,

I would really recommend in the future that you capture HDV and then down-convert in post.

I think you would have much better results as the XL H1 was never truly designed to provide decent footage captured in SD.