Vegas 8.0 Captured Video Quality = POOR

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

Whatever you shot on the camera is exactly what you’re seeing in Vegas. “Capture” is merely data Xfer. Nothing happens to the vid when it’s Xferred from tape or card to the computer’s HDD.
More likely, you’ve got your preview window sized small, set to something other than Preview/Auto or Preview/Full, and you’re seeing downsampled footage instead of the real thing.
Watch the footage from your Explorer or Trimmer, it’ll look exactly the same as it does in the camera or on the television.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[Ram Peters]

I have used a Super VHS and my own camera to capture and the captured video from my camera is FAR worse than the super VHS. The video from my camera is extremely pixelated and very unrecognizable. The video captured by the super VHS is very clear.

[Mike Kujbida]

Please specify your exact capture steps.
Is this being done using the pass-through feature of a miniDV camcorder?
Are you feeding it from the Y/C (aka SVHS) output if your camcorder to the Y/C input of your miniDV camcorder?

[Ram Peters]

My video Camera is a Sony DCR-HC90. I connect it to the computer through the USB port. I open Sony vegas and turn the camera on. I open the capture portion, and press play on the camera, and then begin to capture the video as it is displayed on the screen.

The video looks great on the LCD camera screen and on a TV, but is extremely pixelated and hard to identify after capture. I captured about 1 minute of footage and the file size was 1.5 GB. That seems a bit high.

Under the video tab, under properties the output size is 320 X 240 and cannot be changed. Under the video properties nothing can be changed.

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

A-you can’t capture video over USB. RTFM. Firewire is the only way to reliably Xfer video to your hard drive.
B-What your camera shoots, is a digital transfer to the hard drive. NOTHING is done to the file in the Xfer process.
C-Grasp the small bar beneath the capture window and drag it down. The capture window will re-size to your heart’s content.
This will not affect capture quality/image quality. It *might* cause skipped/dropped frames if your computer is slow.
No matter what, video coming from your camcorder is 720 x 480. How your capture window displays that, or your preview window in Vegas displays that, is entirely selective by you. You can have various sizes/resolutions/framerates in Vegas, depending on how you choose to work.
However, by default, Vegas always opens a DV project, which means it perfectly matches the 720 x 480 that your DCR-HC90 records and outputs.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor