Microsoft DV Format looks bad
 

I am kind of new at this and a little bit confused. Why is it that I can take wonderful looking video from my GL-2, play it from the camera on my TV and it looks great. But when i capture it to my computer using Microsoft DV codec it looks not so good?

Please help.

Thanks.

Joe

The Microsoft DV codec isn't all that bad...Did you see differences on your computer image using another Codec? The point is that if you want to view DV footsage on yr computer screen, the codec has a minimal influence. The difficult part for yr PC is deinterlace and rescale the footage, and that's what makes the picture to "look not so good". High performance deinterlacing and rescaling are two difficult steps in image processing, often ending up in all kinds of artifacts.

Windows Media Player will play DV at half resolution by default. I forget which setting you change for this, asI did it months ago. Is the playback in WMP what you are seeing as terrible video quality?

What software are you using to play it back? Are you viewing it full screen on your computer?

You cannot expect the video to look OK on your computer monitor. You will have to attache a video monitor to make quality judgments on video in your computer.

I don't know if this will help but i recently edited some video i took of a modified car show. As i captured it from my camera (through Premiere) the resulting .avi files were poor quality.

As i was editing the video i noticed it was worse quality than the orignial avi file. I was quite concerned but no amount of fiddling with the settings allowed me to extract any better quality footage from the camera.

It wasn't until a friend of mine at work was talking about jpegs and how they are compressed. Take for example adobe photoshop, as it saves a jpeg it compresses the image, when it reopens it decompresses the image so you can work on it at full quality. It all suddenly made sense as upon editing the film and exporting it uncompressed the quality of the end avi file is fantastic (not to mention huge 3.5 gigs for two mintues).

I therefor assume when premiere captures footage from the camera it compressess using lossless compression so that the file is managable and can be edited easier. It can then be decompressed upon export and recompressed how the user likes. I don't know how true that is but i suggest you try to export some of your captured video and see what the quality is like.

If you're using Premiere, then the Mainconcept codec may give better results.

If you just do editing your quality should not degrade (at all).
When your doing transitions and stuff the quality will degrade
but it should not be visible for a second generation image.

Keep in mind that the preview from Premiere will give you the
quality it can show you in a certain amount. This may mean that
the quality is quite bad (if the CPU doesn't have to time to render
it better). Your footage won't be though. Preview window is just
that, a preview.

Render out your footage to see what it truly looks like. Best is
to output back to tape and watch it on a TV but it should look
okay too with Windows Media Player indeed. Joe is correct
that by default the Microsoft DV Codec plays back at 50%
resolution. If you then scale this up it will look bad indeed. When
pausing the playback go into properties and then find the
DV Codec. Go the this codec's properties and you can change
the quality/resolution to full.

Keep in mind that if you want to judge your footage with WMP
you should display it at exactly 100% (alt + 2) of the original
size.

Thanks everybody
 

I understand what you guys are saying, just two more questions:

1) When I capture the video and edit in Premiere I am then adding text and effects in After effects 5.5. It looks great in after effects. Then I render it out back as a Microsoft DV codec AVI and bring it back into Premiere. When I play it from the timeline onto my video TV monitor, the text looks grainy and there seems to be a loss of quality. At this point I wish I wuold look good so I can just record it to either DV tape or VHS. When I render it from Premiere using Quicktime with sorensen 3 codec it looks awesome! But then what do I do with that huge file and how do I record it now?

2) What is the normal way to output? I have used the Mpeg output in Premiere 6.5 and then created a DVD using high BIT rates and that looks good too. I need to go to tapr though...

<<Keep in mind that the preview from Premiere will give you the
quality it can show you in a certain amount. This may mean that
the quality is quite bad (if the CPU doesn't have to time to render
it better). Your footage won't be though. Preview window is just
that, a preview.>>

I agree, seeing the footage in the preview window is poor quality but the thing that bothered me was the difference in quality between the preview window when capturing the video (which was good quality) and the resulting .avi file (which was a great deal worse when viewed in media player).

My fears were for nothing though as when i rendered the video the quality is superb.

Regards

Nick

Rendered how?

Rendering is the process of outputting the file when work
needs to be done. Just do an export from premiere selecting
AVI - Microsoft DV and check to see all settings are at the
full quality/resolution/framerate and you should get excellent
quality.

When effects etc. are added it is called rendering since
the computer must process the footage first before it can
export it to a new file for you. Hope this explains it a bit.

I do not think we are connecting here. I gues I am mis-communicating. I know what rendering is. My question is what is the best codec to use when rendering? And if you do render, is it possible to get better results then when you tell Premiere to print to video/tape?

Sorry for the confusion.

Joe

Using Vegas, I use Sonic Foundry's DV Codec. From what I have heard, the Main Concept DV Codec is comparable in quality. Both completely blow away the Microsoft DV Codec. I believe you can purchase the Main Concept DV Codec, which would be usable for rendering in Premiere. I'm sure there are other Codecs available for purchase that are around the same quality.

<<<-- Originally posted by Joe Cinquina : I do not think we are connecting here. I gues I am mis-communicating. I know what rendering is. My question is what is the best codec to use when rendering? And if you do render, is it possible to get better results then when you tell Premiere to print to video/tape?

Sorry for the confusion.

Joe -->>>

I personally render as microsoft avi with no compression and then use TMPGenc (http://www.tmpgenc.net/) to recompress the avi as mpeg layer 2. It compressed my 2 minute 3.5Gb avi file down to 128 megs and the quality is the same to my untrained eyes.

Regards

Nick

TMPGEnc does NOT create Layer 2 mpeg. Whenever your
read about layer mpeg it is about MPEG *1* AUDIO. Like MP3 is
Layer 3 MPEG 1. TMPGEnc can ofcourse just create standard
mpeg1 for video but most people use it for MPEG2 creation
to output it to DVD/SVCD.

Joe C., rendering out to an AVI/DV file is exactly the same as
printing/exporting to tape. So the quality will be the same.
When you export it to AVI you can load that up and then print
it to tape and it will NOT do an additional rendering pass so you
will not loose any quality and still have an output AVI to process
further if you want. If you don't need it you can go straight back
to tape if that is your thing though.

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : TMPGEnc does NOT create Layer 2 mpeg. Whenever your
read about layer mpeg it is about MPEG *1* AUDIO. Like MP3 is
Layer 3 MPEG 1. TMPGEnc can ofcourse just create standard
mpeg1 for video but most people use it for MPEG2 creation (no
layers) to output it to DVD/SVCD.
>>>

I must have got confused then, i assumed that mpeg1 was layer 1 (video), mpeg2 was layer 2 (DVD video) and mpeg3 was layer 3 (audio) etc... sorry if I'm giving false info through ignorance, i'm very new to this game i'm afraid. Is there somewhere on the web that explains the different types of mpegs and what the layers mean??

PS. I love the Lady X idea, can't wait to see the episodes.

Regards

Nick

No problem Nick. These things can be confusing.

Pretty easy to read FAQ is here
More on MPEG audio here
A highly technical FAQ can be found here