Mosaic effect with down conversion.

[Barry Uddstrom]

Is anybody having this effect with the down conversion of HD with the Sony A1 camera?
When I down convert from HD to STD DV from the A1 camera to my laptop, wherever there is camera movement or slow panning there is a significant mosaic effect in the picture.
If I first down convert from the camera to my Sony D300E Pal DV deck, then copy over to my laptop I do not get this effect.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Other than this problem I have found this little camera to be very good.

[Mark Bryant]

I've had issues with MAJOR "mosaic" patterns when using the downconvert - and found what has happening is my capturing software (in Sony Vegas) was assuming the source was NTSC DV, when in fact it was PAL. If it works fine when going via your PAL deck, maybe you are seeing the same.

The workaround I found was to put any tape of PAL DV footage into the camcorder (in my case a HC1), and capture a bit of that. Then swap to the HDV tape and downconvert, and it works fine.

It seems to me that for some reason the downconvert is missing information to allow the capture program to see what it is, and it defaults (wrongly) to NTSC. Doing a PAL capture first "primes" it to expect PAL, so a later downconversion correctly defaults to PAL.

Mark

[Barry Uddstrom]

Thank's Mark, I will give it a try and see how I go.