Mini DV Image quality

I have a sony DCR-HC38 and can't seem to get good video. When I capture it I have lots of lines on the video like in the picture I've linked to below. The picture is slightly exaggerated because it is paused but the horizontal lines you can see happen through out the video.

I'm capturing with windv through firewire on a 3ghz Athlon with 2gig of ram onto a SATA2 HD that is not my windows drive and windv reports no dropped frames so I don't think there is a problem there.

I have converted the video to divx and mpeg and it actually gets worse. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

www.ajns.ca/temp/vlcsnap.jpg

 

Are you capturing as a DV-AVI file?

 

Yeah, WinDV is set to type-2 avi.

 

Try type 1 and invest in a cleaning tape. How old is the camcorder?

 

These are interlacing lines. They are visible when you play interlaced video on a PC monitor. DV-AVI is not a very suitable format to play on PC's anyway.
If you still see the effect after encoding to DivX and MPEG, you probably have switched the line order. Check your conversion software if you can chage the line order ("bottom line first" or "top line first").

 

Thanks I'll give that a try and report back.

 

Here are some possible reasons:

1) Conversion always results in a poorer picture. You don't notice this as much with DVD files since they are ultra-clean. However, DV is not a clean source so artifacts show up much more easily. The answer is to use a good quality encoding program. Tweak the settings on TMPG or use CCE/ProCoder. (Personally, I use ProCoder.) Always use the highest quality encode settings.

2) It's the camcorder itself. The DCR-H2x/3x/4x all have the same technical guts - meaning the quality of the encode is lower in pixels. That translates into a grainier picture. If you look at the specs for the DCR-H9x, you'll see that there's a huge jump in pixels. Nothing you can do here.

 

I don't understand what you are trying to say. DV is much higher quality than DVD. If any format is susceptible for artifacts, it is MPEG (which is used for DVD). Anyway, the problem mentioned by the poster here has nothing to do with artifacts. It is simply the effect of interlaced DV material shown on a PC monitor.