Video quality from digital camcorder?

[Cabadam]

I am in the process of using Pinnacle Studio 8 to create a DVD of content recorded on a digital camcorder. I have more or less finished the first DVD and created the files for it, so I could preview them before actually burning (loading video_ts.vob into PowerDVD).

I notice that the video all seems to be fairly fuzzy. It did not look like this when viewed directly from the camcorder onto a TV. Is this simply because I am viewing it on a computer? Will it look "right" when actually played on a TV again? Or have I lost something during the process? It *said* it was being created @ 100% quality (as I intended), but it doesn't actually look like it. The picture just isn't crisp on the computer.

[maa]

Hi,

your video should look great on the computer in DV format before converting to mpeg.
If there is a quality loss then its due to the mpeg conversion settings. There are many ways to do this.

maa

[Cabadam]

Well, the wierd thing is that even the DV avi didn't look at all that great either.

[scharfis_brain]

do you mean INTERLACING?
those combing-effect in moving areas?

[maa]

DV is a 1:1 transfer of your original tape so if its no good it wont get better unless you're seeing artifacts like interlacing as brain mentioned...

[Cabadam]

No, its not the interlacing (although I definately noticed that when watching the AVI. Its just that everything seems fuzzy. I don't know... I may get a chance to burn a test copy tonight and see if I'm just nuts.

[DIggedy]

Was it shot indoors? Low light can be the cause of fuzzy and grainy images.

[Cabadam]

No... almost 100% of it is outdoor scenery (took a 3 week vacation to Alaska). And again, the quality when viewed on our TV directly from our camcorder appears to be pretty good - DEFINATELY better than what I'm viewing on my computer.

[scharfis_brain]

ok, then. Please post a Screenshot.
Because noone really knows your problem.

[Arky]

What model of camcorder are you using? Does it have manual override controls? It is unlikely that you would suffer from high noise footage if you were shooting outdoors, but even this is conceivably possible if you were using an extremely fast exposure speed, manually set to override automatic options. Whenever the CCD (Charge Coupled Device) is exposed to limited light, as DIggedy mentioned, picture noise is introduced because CCDs are inefficient at low light levels, and also because the circuitry required to amplify a weak signal introduces some noise of it's own.

Bearing in mind that because a (standard) television screen is of a lower resolution than a computer screen, it is not unusual for a video picture to look better on a television screen than on a more revealing computer screen. Furthermore, if (IF!) we are talking about picture 'noise' here (and we will all have a better idea of what is going on once you have posted a JPEG screenshot on the forum), then this would present significant difficulty to your MPEG encoder, since it's very efficiency relies upon being able to discard that information between I/B/P frames which pertains to non-moving areas of the picture. If there is mosquito noise all over it, then everything, in a sense, is moving, so little discarding can occur. The end result is that your MPEG bitrate gets 'spread too thinly' across the image and final subjective image quality suffers.

Noise issues aside, you don't mention what encoder, and what encoder settings, you are using. It is possible that you have inadvertantly used SIF (Standard Interface Format - 352x288 PAL/352x240 NTSC) framesize settings during your MPEG encoding, the end result of which would look more 'blurred' than the original DV, quite simply because half the detail is removed in both horizontal and vertical planes.

Whatever it is, I'm sure the cause of your problem is very simple indeed, and no doubt the instant you post your screenshot, someone will 'nail' the cause immediately :)


Arky ;o)

[Cabadam]

Sorry for the delay in my response - got tied up with "real" work and school.

Well, someone went ahead and burned the DVD and put it onto TV and turns out that it doesn't look half bad on TV, very close to what it originally was. Just looked bad for some reason on my computer.

Arky, you mention that it would look better on a TV because it is typically a lower resolution screen than a computer. How then, does a TV enlarge the picture without it looking bad as it would on a computer?

[mpucoder]

As long as the aspect ratios match (4:3 on standard TV, 16:9 on widescreen) no resizing is needed. DVD players use 720x480 resolution.

On a computer monitor you can actually see all 345,600 pixels. But to display it you would need a luminance channel bandwidth of 13.5MHz (the same as the sampling rate), but NTSC limits luminance bandwidth to 4.5MHz (and color, if you use composite, to 500KHz Pb, 1500KHz Pr). Most sets have even lower luminance bandwidth, typically 3.58MHz - almost 4:1 reduction in detail.

[DIggedy]

another reason the source can look worse on a pc monitor (assuming your checking it fullscreen) is the display is scaling the image alot larger as I'd imagine your monitor res would be at least 1024x768, as opposed to the SD resolution of a tv screen.

[Cabadam]

Originally posted by DIggedy
another reason the source can look worse on a pc monitor (assuming your checking it fullscreen) is the display is scaling the image alot larger as I'd imagine your monitor res would be at least 1024x768, as opposed to the SD resolution of a tv screen.
That was kind of what I meant by my question. I run at 1152x864, and it definately looks worse when i run it full screen. Yet a TV looks "full screen" at a size much larger than my monitor and it does not suffer that loss of quality.

[scharfis_brain]

please remind, that TV are painting the picture using interlacing and the camcorder uses this way of recording the video, too.
But your PC-Monitor paints the picture Progressive, so interlaced DV-Video WILL look worse on PC.

another thing may be, thate the DV-Directshow-Decoder only decodes the video at half size.

to adjust this,
click right on the videopicture in mplayer2,
select properties,
advanced,
dv-decoder,
full,
as standard,
ok,
ok,
ok.

[mpucoder]

Originally posted by scharfis_brain
please remind, that TV are painting the picture using interlacing and the camcorder uses this way of recording the video, too.
But your PC-Monitor paints the picture Progressive, so interlaced DV-Video WILL look worse on PC.

Good point. This is especially apparent when the camera pans, or there are moving objects.