[Jim Amen]

Thanks Tim, great information. It really is helpful to know that someone else is regularly doing what I want to do.

As I worked through all the possibilities you and others here mentioned, I found marginal or no improvement. However, for me the smoking gun was ‘frame blend’. True enough the preview was not my friend through the process for all the reasons mentioned but when I turned frame blend off (it defaults to on in my system, probably because I don’t yet know how to set all the defaults) everything else started to make sense. I still have a little interlace jitter but not so much I can’t live with it since I want to play back on old fashioned NTSC TV’s.

Thanks everyone for the help.

[Jim Amen]

But thats not going to work for me. I already have several video’s with people standing in front of equipment talking and I want to then show what the software they are using is doing on the computer screen. In the same movie. One obvious option would be to just shoot the screen with a camera but then I’m faced with light reflection, frame rates, etc etc. I know when I’m all done I won’t get resolution on a TV like I have on a cmputer screen but I should at least be able to get something that is readable.

[Jim Amen]

First, I am working in DV time frame and I have experienced the preview quality issue on other things so I use as my ‘gold standard’ rendering some or all of the test screen capture with Premiere as an AVI file, and then viewing it with Windows Media Player. The AVI in to Premier looks great in MP, the AVI out (and thus to a TV) looks crappy, almost like half or a third of the horizontal scan lines are thrown out (for example a piece of text with the capital F may have the entire top horizontal portion missing).

Not sure on the square vs .9 pixel ratio but my instinct tells me I’m a long way from worring about that one.

Finally, I tried uncompressed in Camtasia. It was no different.

Do I need a scan converter box like the AVT-3150 in order to make it look good?

Thanks