Poor DV capture quality

[vcdude]

Let me first state that I am a DV noob

I am using premiere 6 to capture DV from my Camcorder. The captured results a far poorer than those achieved by simply playing tapes from the camcorder AV-out on my TV. The images look grainy and when there is fast motion on the screen the moving objects get what I would describe as interlace artifacts (half the horizontal scan lines from the previous fram mixed with the next). I'm using the Movie Capture feature of Prem6. Is there something really obviously wrong with what I am doing? The capture settings appear to match those of the source too (with 12bit audio)
My System:

AMD XP1800
512Mb RAM
Geforce4 T14400 128MB
13 + 40gb 7200rpm
Generic Brand Firewire Card
yada yada

Cam is a Panasonic NV-MX7 MiniDV

Any suggestions would be appreciated

This forum has helped me immensely with DVD2SVCD...thanks guys :D:

[bb]

First of all I'd like to mention that your DV file is interlaced. This is true for most DV shots, but there are some people (like me) who always shoot progressive video - which you can do only if your camcorder supports that (unfortunately there are only a few, e.g. the Canon MV3).

If you watch your DV video on a computer monitor, you'll see much more detail than on a TV set. If you don't see the grain on TV, then this is nothing but the proof that TV screens blur the picture.

TVs output the video field based, thus you don't see any interlacing artefacts. Computer monitors are frame based, so you always see two fields at the same time, although they were shot at slightly different times (1/50s difference). As a result you see the interlacing artefacts.

If you want to encode your DV source for viewing on a PC monitor, you have to deinterlace. For TV viewing only you can leave it interlaced, provided that you encode to a format which supports interlaced mode (like MPEG-2: SVCD or DVD). Even for SVCD many people prefer to deinterlace, because progressive material compresses better, and you get a better overall quality.

bb

[theReal]

The playback of DV files on the monitor doesn't look very good, also you should make sure that the playback driver for DV is set to full resolution playback (the MS Direct Show DV driver is set to only half resolution per default, which looks really bad).

Record back the file to camcorder via FireWire and then watch it on tv again. You will see it's the same as before :)

[vcdude]

Thanks for your help.
I checked out the cameras menus and the Panasonic NV-MX7 has an option for progressive...it was set to auto. I havent tried it yet but I am sure this will improve things. :D