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Poor Quality From Sony Handycam DCR-TRV130
Hi,
I am new to the forum and to using Sony Vegas. I have the Studio HD 11.0 (the low end version). I have a Sony Handycam DCR-TRV130 camera and about 50-60 tapes that I am converting and putting them onto my server. I am using the DV output from the camera to create the tapes. The tapes are crystal clear when I play them back from the camera to a TV, but the ones stored on the server are grainy.
I have selected DV video and the project is set to DV NTSC.
Any advice or pointer would be appriciated.
Thanks,
Brian
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4 Replies
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The camera you’re using, Sony DCR-TRV130, is a Digital 8 camcorder. Assuming you’re bring the video in via Firewire, while the process seems like video capture, you’re actually doing a digital copy from the camcorder. What you capture on the PC will be exactly what’s on that tape, same as what you see on the TV.
Are you copying the DV AVIs directly to the server, or converting them? That’s one source of quality loss… converting the name format to something else can certainly damage the quality.
It may just be the difference in viewing. When you watch these on a television, you’re viewing a video shot in PAL or NTSC native format, on a device presumably designed to display that format optimally, despite its relatively low resolution. When viewed on a PC, you’re expanding that 720×480 or 720×576 to a full PC screen… yours may not be 1920×1200 like mine, but chances are, the PC screen is much higher native resolution. And you’re viewing much closer. The two of these conspire to make SD video look much worse than on TV.
Next come interlacing… that camera only shoots in 60i (NTSC) or 50i (PAL), which looks ok on an old timey CRT, and can look even better if viewed on an HDTV with a good upscaler/deinterlacer. But it can look pretty grim on a computer monitor.
It could also be your monitor. A CRT delivers about a 15,000:1 contrast ratio, more or less. A modern LCD/LED television can kind of simulate this, and even more; other technologies, like DLP or Plasma, exceed the contrast ratio of a CRT. But PC LCDs… not so much. You may have something like 800:1 or 1000:1… not much dynamic range. Worse yet, if you have a TN LCD rather than an MVA/PVA or IPS display, you may only have 6-bits per color resolution, rather than 8-bits per color.. so you’ll see banding and other low-color effects that you don’t see on TV.
It could also be your player. Image processing of an SD video will enhance viewing on a computer monitor just as it would on an HDTV. Simple programs like VLC or Windows Media Player don’t do much here; you may want to try “Splash Lite”, which does some image processing you won’t find in these other two.
-Dave
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Dave,
Thanks for the response.
Yes I am using Firewire to transfer the video.
When I render the video to the hard drive I select the Video for Windows (*.avi) which results in NTSC DV with
Video: 29.970 fps, 720X480Is there a better format to use?
I have a AOC back lit LED monitor that claims 50,000,000:1 DCR. It is a 1900 X 1200 and I use a DVI connection.
I am using windows media player on Windows 7 Pro.
I may be that I am getting the best possible copy of the videos that I can. I am doing this for 2 reasons:
1. To preserve the original video as close as I can to the original format without losing quality.
2. To have them on a big server for my family to view anytime they want.Thanks again for the help.
Brian
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[Brian Mason] “When I render the video to the hard drive I select the Video for Windows (*.avi) which results in NTSC DV with
Video: 29.970 fps, 720X480Is there a better format to use?”
So you’re capturing over Firewire, yielding a DV AVI. You edit, and render back to a DV AVI. The only thing that’s likely to change input to output are changes you make in Vegas. Vegas will “Smart Render” DV to DV — it makes an exact digital copy, input to output, for any video not being edited. So if you’re color grading or making other adjustments, it all gets re-rendered. If you’re just cut editing, it’s virtually identical to the input.
Do make sure you’re rendering to DV. There are dozens of types of video that can be put in an AVI wrapper, DV is just one of them. They vary widely in quality.
You can sanity check youself, too. Grab an unused tape, print your edited video to back to the Sony, and play it on your TV as you have in the past. If it looks bad, that’s an indication that you’re damaging it somehow on that trip through Vegas. Large adjustments of brightness and contrast, some other effects, can do that — video can be fairly fragile, like anything that’s only 24-bit color.
If it looks as good as the original on your TV, then it’s some aspect of your computer playback that’s the issue.
[Brian Mason] “I have a AOC back lit LED monitor that claims 50,000,000:1 DCR. It is a 1900 X 1200 and I use a DVI connection.”
Look like AOC makes monitors that sound fairly good… I didn’t find one that’s both LED backlit (an “LED” monitor is a marketing term for an LCD with a LED backlight… “back lit” is superior to “edge lit”… it’s modulation of the LEDs in small zones that gives you the crazy dynamic contrast range) and 1920×1200, but I did find a 1920×1080 IPS panel unit.
Anyway, with the right software behind it, this should look similar to an HDTV of the same size, when playing video… most monitors these days are borrowing heavily from TV technology — thus the 1920×1080 rather than 1920×1200. But a television does a bunch of high quality upscaling and de-interlacing for video playback, and the video is always in full sync with the screen. That’s not necessarily the case with a computer display.
Anyway, give the print-to-tape exercise a go, and that will at least split the problem for you.
-Dave
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Dave,
Sorry for the delayed response.
I finally tried “print to tape” an it looks the same viewing it on the new tape version. So I guess it is just a side effect of stretching the video to bigger monitors.
Thanks for enlightening me about how the data is stored on the tape, that makes sense to me now. So when I capture off of my camera the studio makes a bunch of AVI clips. Then the studio allows me to arrange those clips an create a new combined larger AVI clip. When I do that it states that no compression is needed since the output format matches the captured format.
Thanks again for your help.
Brian
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