Bad picture quality when capturing with firewire!

[erdben]

I just bought a camcorder and I'd like to transfer video to my laptop and write DVD later.

I tried Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premier 6.0 and everything was fine, I was able to capture, edit, export movie, but at the end picture quality was always really bad when I played back on my computer (on TV it looks great, when played back from the camcorder).
It blurs when the picture moves, especially at sharp edges and where there is a strong contrast. It looks as a badly compressed movie, although the files are big (for example 91.5 MB for 25 sec).
I used the highest quality setup (DV-AVI).

I think the problem is with the capturing, because the captured avi files already look bad.

I used a SONY trv 33, firewire, and a P4 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 40 GB HDD laptop and have no idea what to do, so please give me some advise!

Thanks!

[rsquirell]

Pick up a short (3ft max) GOLD firewire cable from circuit city or best buy. There's a lot of loss in wires. Tell us if it improves.

[erdben]

Hi, thanks!
But I don't think it's the cable. It is a 3 ft long cable, and the other thing is that yesterday I tried to play back the captured avi files from adobe premier through the firewire and the camcorder to the TV, and the picture was perfect on the TV! But it still looks very bad on the monitor.

Maybe I'm using a wrong fileformat - resolution - interlace??

I'd like to save my videos in a format I can watch both on TV and computer.

I'm a complete beginner in this field, I tried to figure out these things, but I had no success. So thanks for your help!

[rsquirell]

The firewire cable supplied with your camera IS NOT GOLD for one simple reason...Gold is more expensive. It can improve your capture quality significantly...but they aren't cheap. If the vid looks good on the TV through S-Vid cable from camera...and there aren't any great anomolies in the capture beside the blurring during movement you may not be getting a "lossless capture" and gold cables might help you here.

[kimomakano]

I am not sure gold cables will make a difference though it might be worth a try. I capture my video (analog) using a standard Radio Shack (non-gold) AV cable and it is 12 feet long (it is a long story why I had to use such a long cable but it was necessary at the time). The quality of capture I get is quite good.

[erdben]

Thanks guys, but it seems the problem is that the captured video is interlaced, and as I learned, I have to deinterlace it to get a good quality video on the computer.
I did it with Windows Media Encoder 9 and it's much better (although it still looks better on TV)!
But my question is, how should I capture / convert the raw avi files, to make DVD at the end? Interlaced or deinterlaced?
For example, I have a software, came with my laptop, Sonic MyDVD, which says it will burn DVD directly from the camcorder. But it creates the same bad (interlaced) video! There is no option for deinterlacing!
How can I deinterlace the avis during capturing? What software should I use? And finally why is this so complicated?


Thanks again!

[kimomakano]

Glad you got it figured out. I used to use Sonic when I first got my burner (also because it came with it). I have since switched to using VirtualDub to capture AVI files. Check it out at www.virtualdub.com. It is free and excellent.

[schu4647]

In regards to the cable, this is digital video, losses aern't an issue. Either you get all the frames or you don't. Gold cables will not improve the quality of your video.