Problem with extracting quality Video from analog VCR!

[wildseid]

Hi!

I am trying to convert my VCR tapes into digital files on my computer.

I dont have a video capture card, so what I am doing is recording from my VCR onto my Canon DVCam ZR10, and then capturing from the DVCam using Adobe Premiere 6.5. This makes large AVI's on my computer.

Now their is a very obvious difference in the quality of the captured video vs what I see on TV or even what I see on the recorded DV tape! The DV tape/TV have a lot more detail. The captured video is dull and muddy.

Now -

1. Does it make a difference if I buy a capture card and capture straight from the VCR instead of going via the DVCam route? If so - which card do you recommend?

2. The size of the AVI's is huge! I have found that converting to quicktime files w/sorenson compression works pretty good. Is there a better quality way?


thank you very much for all help!

[wildseid]

noone...?

[atifsh]

capture ur video as u were and burn it as a vcd or svcd and see that video on TV. if that seems ok then perhaps ur video is good , usually monitors have better resolutions and may result in poor visual quality of lower resulotion videos.

or simple get a hardware encoder card like Snazzi's VCD Maker as this card give really bright and good video qulity. or get the higher models to capture at mpeg2.

[rsquirell]

Another poster with the same problem discovered he had set his PC screen to too low a resolution. Change the PC screen's resolution and see if it doesn't look better. Also...if you capture straight thru the firewire in DV to ULead Video Studio 7 or Pinnacle Studio 8 your AVI files will be converted to MPEG2 on the fly ( if you want to save some space. Trial versions are available.