Sony DV handycam - newbie / poor quality

31 Dec 2006 11:48 PM

Dave R

Hi all,
I am new to camcorders and this group, I have bought a brand new Sony
Handycam HC35 and although the playback is good on the TV (ie when
plugged in directly) when I play about with it on the laptop and
download the clips I want, using Windows Movie Maker, when I play the
clips back on full screen the quality is bloody awful, it's like i've
taken the video clips with my mobile phone!!
Is it something to do with the camera, or the laptop. I expected that
quality to be at least similar to the quality on the TV.
Hope someone can help,
Dave

1 Jan 2007 9:53 AM

bernie

I assume that when you say you play the clips back full screen, you
mean on the laptop. Depending on what the quality of the laptop screen
is, the resolution is likely to be something like 1280x768. If you are
in the United States the resolution of a tv screen is 720x480, or
elsewhere 720x576. So when you play full screen, you spread the low-res
tv picture all over a huge screen, thus making it look very average.

Bernie

1 Jan 2007 12:16 PM

yeltz

Dave R wrote:

> Hi all,
> I am new to camcorders and this group, I have bought a brand new Sony
> Handycam HC35 and although the playback is good on the TV (ie when
> plugged in directly) when I play about with it on the laptop and
> download the clips I want, using Windows Movie Maker, when I play the
> clips back on full screen the quality is bloody awful, it's like i've
> taken the video clips with my mobile phone!!
> Is it something to do with the camera, or the laptop. I expected that
> quality to be at least similar to the quality on the TV.
> Hope someone can help,
> Dave

How are you transferring the video from your videocamera to your PC? If
you are using a USB cable, then switch to a Firewire/I-Link/IEEE 1394
(they're all the same) connection. USB connections were only designed
for low quality, web-cam like video - exactly what you're seeing now.
If you use a Firewire connection, then you will be transferring an
exact copy of what's on your tape in the full 720 x 480 resolution (720
x 576 if you're in PAL-land).

Even when you do transfer your video using a Firewire connection, you
will probably notice some interlacing artifacts when viewing. This is
completely normal. If you view your video using VLC
www.videolan.org/vlc - then you can enable a de-interlacing filter that
will make the video look much better on your computer screen. If your
final output is DVD, then do not de-interlace your video when encoding
to MPG-2.

2 Jan 2007 10:39 PM

Dave Martindale

"Dave R" <v8bob***@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>Hi all,
>I am new to camcorders and this group, I have bought a brand new Sony
>Handycam HC35 and although the playback is good on the TV (ie when
>plugged in directly) when I play about with it on the laptop and
>download the clips I want, using Windows Movie Maker, when I play the
>clips back on full screen the quality is bloody awful, it's like i've
>taken the video clips with my mobile phone!!

Windows Movie Maker is showing you a low-resolution preview image
intended only for editing. I assume it does this so it can work on
relatively low-end machines with old graphics cards. It does this even
in full-screen mode.

However, when you captured the video WMM wrote an AVI file somewhere on
your hard disk. Find it, and play that AVI in Windows Media Player (or
anything else designed for movie playback, like mplayerc). You should
see the full resolution of the video.

Dave