Hi, I am trying to transfer my daughters Hi8 tapes to DVD . My player\camera is a Sony DCR-TRV140 and my pc is a me-built one with an AMD Athlon 3200+ chip and 1gb of ram. I am using a firewire to transfer the video, and the firewire card is an add on. The problem is that when I play the video into my pc, it looks great. But as soon as I press capture, it gets very grainy and the DVD I burn from the file is grainy also. Why in the wide world of sports is this happening? Also, the tapes I am using are Sony Hi8 MP. Thank you in advance very much, Scott
Thanks for responding so quickly. No, I am capturing to an MPEG file. And like I mentioned, the picture on the screen goes from clear to grainy as soon as I press capture. Thanks again for your help, Scott
Try capturing as an .avi file. It is lossless capture, unlike the compression that .mpeg does. The files will be much larger, but the quality difference is worth it. What program are you using to capture?
OK, I just captured a video the same as I have been trying before. I noticed that in Nero after the capture process, Nero says the file is a DV-AVI Type 1 file. 720 x 480 4:3 ratio. But after I have burned it to a disk the file is saved in a MPEG format. Does this tell you anything? Thanks for your help, Scott
Did you burn it as a DVD compliant movie to play on your set top DVD player? If so, then it would be mpeg, actually mpeg2, which is what DVD compliant movies are.
OK, I have been playing with it and have made some progress. I have noticed that before I push "record" that it lets me change a setting from "DVD" to "DV" and then choose either type 1 or type 2. Choosing DV seems to be better and I believe it captures the video to an .avi file which later converts to mpeg-2 when transfered to a dvd disk (am I close :>) I then play it on a dvd player and watch it on my tv, but it still is not as clear as I would like it to be. I imagine a lot of that is because the original is on tape and not digital. It is getting better though. Any suggestions before I keep going with this VERY time consuming task? Thanks again. Scott
Yes, you have captured as an .avi file now, and you aren't going to get better video quality than that, from your tapes.
I personally transfered a lot of analog tapes to DVD and you should be able to get real good quality. If you use a Digital8 camcorder to transfer your Hi8 tapes via Firewire to DV-AVI (which it looks like you are doing), you are on the right track. And indeed, when you author a DVD the movie gets converted to mpeg-2. And this is the most important step that determines your quality. I don't like the MPGEG-encoder (which does the conversion) built into Nero at all. I suggest you to try TMPGEnc. There is a freeware version at www.tmpgenc.net that has a 30 days free trial MPEG-2 conversion. Load your AVI in TMPGEnc and load the appropriate DVD template (PAL or NTSC), set the bitrate to at least 7000kb/s and the parameter onthe settings tab on high quality. There are many other paramters in there that you can tweak to maximize quality, but for your first try you should just leave all of them default and just chek if you like the quality. The conversion will be quite slow, but after that you should have a real decent quality. When doen you have an mpeg file which you cna import into Nero Vision Express to author your DVD.
