Purchased a Sony TRV280 Digital 8 camcorder recently after reading good
reviews about its picture quality (for its price range of course)
compared to similarly priced models like the Samsung miniDV.

Viewed a tape on a friend's TV (a high end Sony plasma or LCD) and was
satisfied with the picture quality. Used the supplied USB cable to
transfer the video to my laptop and, frankly, the quality sucked.
Looked awful at full screen.

The manual implies one needs a firewire (iLink) cable for better
transfer resolutions. 'Scuse me, but digital is digital, is it not?
Isn't the difference between USB and firewire one of speed rather than
quality? I've never heard of the quality of anything differing between
USB and any other digital transfer aside from speed.

Turns out, of course, that Sony's firewire cable (iLink) for the TRV280
is $40. Nothing much to write home about aside from the fact that I
suspect this is a scam by Sony to increase profits.

Is the low quality transfer using the supplied USB cable due to a true
limitation in the USB spec when applied to digital video, or has Sony
"engineered" the low resolution USB / dumbed it down intentionally? I
can imagine a bogus argument about "having" to do so because customers
would be dissatisfied with a high quality USB transfer speed otherwise.
An argument which could be shot down immediately by including a low /
high quality option.

I'm using their crap "video capture" software at full resolution, and
the picture quality still sucks.

Can I tweak things to get better quality resolution using the USB
cable?

Thanks in advance.

Also wondering if there is any good open source / freeware software I
can use to create menu'ed DVDs. Just simple menus.

Finally, what codec does Sony use for the TRV280? The awful USB Picture
Package "video capture" mode produced an AVI - not sure which kind. Is
there an uncompressed transfer mode or is that it? Is it compressing on
the fly in the camcorder itself?

And if I buy the iLink cable, would I use the same crap "video capture"
picture package software (HandyCam tools), or is there other software I
can or should use?

Thanks again.

Sorry, a few more questions.

Can anyone advise on using the 16:9 widescreen format vs. full screen?
Is the 16:9 recording option just a gimmick, e.g. same visual range as
full screen with letterboxing bars superimposed, trimming down the full
screen image - or is there genuinely something different in the lens /
CCD capture that gets enabled when the 16:9 mode is on?

I recorded a bunch of video in full screen when I thought I'd read in
the manual that wide screen recording was enabled by default - it
wasn't.

mikeer***@yahoo.com wrote:

Depends on the camcorder. "True" 16:9 (16F16) does not have bars if you
view the captured frames on a computer, but fills the whole frame with
picture, this way utilizing all available resolution on the storage
medium, without wasting it on black areas. Compare Figure 1 and Figure 2
on this page:

<http://www.smr-home-theatre.org/anamorphic/Anamorphic.html>

That, of course, does not still say anything about whether the image was
originally _acquired_ with a better or worse resolution than the 4:3
(12F12) picture. That would depend on the resolution of the CCD chip and
how the image data was originally cropped from that matrix.

Manufacturers don't usually tell these things in plain English, so
shooting a resolution test chart in both modes would be one way to find
out whether the quality is acceptable (in practice) or not:

<http://www.bealecorner.com/gl1/resout/index.html>

When comparing 16:9 and 4:3 images shot with the same camcorder,
especially the resolution in the vertical direction would be of some
interest. If it is clearly worse in 16:9 mode, when comparing the
captured images on a computer screen, then you probably wouldn't want to
use the widescreen mode.

You would want to use real DV captures (over Firewire) for assessing the
picture quality, not something you captured over USB.

For these kind of tests, VirtualDub might come handy:

<http://www.virtualdub.org/>

That's a tool that can easily show you the raw DV frames without doing
"smart" things behind your back (such as deinterlacing or correcting the
aspect ratio.)

<mikeer***@yahoo.com> wrote in message
On your camcorder, yes.  On all camcorders, no.

Show quoteHide quote

mikeer***@yahoo.com wrote:

You could try "dvdauthor". It's a command-line driven program, but there
are GUI frontends for it:

<http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/>
<http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=GUI_for_dvdauthor>

The DV codec, of course (see <http://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html>), but you
will only get that data via Firewire. Over USB, it's probably something
else. Perhaps some M-JPEG variant.

Use Gspot to find out:
<http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=GSpot>

All decent, modern video editors support DV transfers over Firewire.
It's an industry standard.

Windows XP comes with Windows Movie Maker which can be used for that:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Movie_Maker>

You can dowload DVIO, which is perhaps the simplest program for DV
captures:
<http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm>.

There's Avid Free DV, which you can download for free:
<http://www.avid.com/freedv/>

Scenalyzer might come handy if you want sophisticated capturing:
<http://www.scenalyzer.com/>

Then there's Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere Pro, Ulead VideoStudio and
Mediastudio, Pinnacle Studio, Avid Xpress DV, Avid Liquid, ...

mikeer***@yahoo.com wrote:

Not in the case of DV camcorders. The whole DV standard was designed
around Firewire. DV camcorders were the first commercial devices to
implement the IEEE-1394 standard. USB didn't exist back then, or at
least didn't exist as a sufficiently high-speed version. USB was a
Johnny-came-lately to the DV world.

Since everything related to DV has already been standardized around
1394, the manufacturers, generally, don't seem to bother with USB and
full-quality DV transfers.

The USB connector on many camcorders is only used for transferring still
images to the computer, or for using it as a webcam (with less than full
quality images.)

Firewire cables are generic; you don't have to buy one that is branded
"Sony".

Hard to say without knowing anything specific about the design of the
camcorders. It might be one of those cases where implementing
DV+Firewire is fairly easy because there are already established ways of
doing it - perhaps even integrated chips that have the DV codec onboard
and handle Firewire transfers back and forth semi-automatically. Perhaps
there isn't anything quite like that for DV-over-USB, and implementing
it that way would be more expensive and troublesome.

Note that DV-over-Firewire is an established standard on the computer
side, too, and you don't need any manufacturer-specific drivers for
that. So DV-over-USB might be harder to implement in that respect too.
(For example, does Windows support DV-over-USB out of the box, the way
it already supports DV-over-Firewire?)

Probably not. Just buy a cheap generic Firewire card and a cheap generic
Firewire cable and be done with it, like the rest of us. USB has never
really been used on DV camcorders for proper editing or video transfers.
It has always been just an add-on gimmick for stills and webcam-style
video. It's not a Sony thing, it's just the way how things _are_ in the
world of DV camcorders.

Thanks. The firewire connector on the camcorder side looks proprietary,
but I will check it with ones in the store. Already have firewire built
into my Dell laptop so that's not an issue.

My guess is that the connector on the camcorder is proprietary - the
Sony cable describes itself as 4 pin to 6 pin. Not sure if that is
standard or not.

mikeer***@yahoo.com wrote:

It's a standard 4-pin Firewire connector as far as I can see from the
closeup image in this review:

<http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Sony-DCR-TRV280-Camcorde
r-Review.htm>

There are two types of Firewire connectors: 6-pin (large/wide) and 4-pin
(small). The difference is as follows:

<http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000165AS0.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg>

Depending on the connector on your laptop, you would either need a 4-pin
to 4-pin cable or a 6-pin to 4-pin cable. Both should be readily
available in computer stores. See
<http://www.cutpricecables.co.uk/ifirewire.html>.

<mikeer***@yahoo.com> wrote in message
It's not proprietary.  You can use any 4-pin to
whatever-you-have-on-your-computer 1394/Firewire cable.


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Oh, and don't buy the cable in big box stores like BestBuy. They totally
rip you off on accessories like that. Expect to the tune of $40 for a
firewire cable over there (gold plated monster yada yada) vs less than
$5 or so in the right webstores. I have had good results with
monoprice.com (their website seemed down just now?). Or try a smaller
local computer store, but don't pay more than about $10.

Martijn



PTravel wrote:
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Martijn van Duijn <dune@DONTSPAMMEdds.nl> wrote in news:SHhYg.12949
$GR.3***@newssvr29.news.prodigy.net:

I concur with that. If the TRV280 is the same as the TRV30 then you will
only get the stills and low-definition stuff from the memory stick via
USB, and you might need additional drivers to get it to work properly. 
Firewire on my TRV30 works fine, no loss or drop-out, standard cheap
cable.
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