Is my fire wire card good enough ?
 

Footage on my camera transferred to svhs is far more exciting than footage transferred to my computer. I’m not sure if there is some video signal loss via my 1394 ieee card or if there may be some other problem
The sound does not seem to suffer in a way that is audible; in fact I’ve been ripping the audio portion of live music events and taking orders for cd’s of the audio only. But the video transfers just don’t do the footage justice and is not very flattering.
Will there be a difference in the capture quality between various fire wire cards, and if so...what should I purchase to remedy this problem ??
Thanks

Are you judging the quality from within your NLE? Are you playing it back in Windows Media Player? Do you monitor from your NLE to a TV/monitor? Anything destined for TV should be viewed on a TV at least, if not a broadcast monitor (which I don't have incidentally). What you see on a PC monitor, particularly in your NLE, is likely down-rezzed for better playback.

David Hurdon

I doubt that the problem is your 1394 card. I have a cheap one and I have absolutely no problem transferring to my computer. It looks great in Vegas as DV.

The rendered output can look lousy if you use the wrong player. For example, with my setup, mpeg2 looks terrible on WMP but looks fine on powerDVD. As already asked, what are you looking at?

Presently im wrestling with Pinnacle studio v.8.12.7 I got lost using adobe premier and have also tried Power Director Pro and Microsoft Movie maker...I play back with Windows Media player on 2 different computers with similar results. My full time employment centers around my small computer retail store so suffice it to say the computers are built to today’s fastest standards however the fire wire card i mentioned is not by any means expensive. The issues im concerned about include soft focus and contrasty footage. I live in an extremely remote n.w. corner of Minnesota, and the list of photographers up here is short and booked solid so folks have been turning to me as a stop gap photographer. I have vast experience with Olympus 2100 uz, Photoshop, Ive shot the pdx-10 for about 2 years and recently purchased a Pentax 645 for Weddings etc. As mentioned earlier, The sound reproduction i achieve with the pdx-10 has sold my work but i need to ramp up on the video rendering problems.
btw Thanks Dave and Steve

More info please?
 

Can you describe more precisely what you are doing and what happens?

You say, "footage transferred to SVHS". By this do you mean playing back on the camera, throught the svideo DIN port, direct to a TV?


Exactly what have you created that you playing back in WMP? Is it MPEG2? What frame size is it (look in your export settings in Studio to find the answers to these questions).

Regards,

Julian