How to better captured dig. video quality ?

[starec]

For capturing digital video to computer I am using Sony DCR-TRV 255E + i.Link + Ulead Video studio 6. /AMD 750, 256 MB RAM, GeForce 2-32 Mb/.

1./ I do not know how to capture video /from my camcorder/ in near DVD quality, ...or better quality. Most often I use MPEG PAL /352x288 ...I think/, video playback is smooth, but in full screen mode it is not very nice.
When I use MPEG 720x5xx, video playback is not smooth so I can not use it. Also using AVI format is nonsense, video playback is not smooth and file is really, really ,... big - it means several GBs.

2./ Is there any good software /maybe freeware/ for slowing down video /like replay in sport/ ?

Thank you very much,
Regards,

[djidjo]

You shouldn't encode "on-the-fly" in MPEG format or any other format. If you want full quality, you should use what you call "AVI Format" which must be DV format. And it's normal the file is really big, several GB, that's the size for a DV Movie. Playback is not smooth probably because your hard disk ist not fast enough to read all the data, but you don't care, because once you have the DV, you're going to encode it in DivX or XVid or other format to fit it on one CD - and you don't need smooth DV playback for DV encoding.
Hope this helps,
Djidjo

[theReal]

Playback is not smooth probably because your hard disk is not fast enough to read all the data,If the HDD is not fast enough to read the data, then it won't be able to write the data for sure... However I don't think it's this - I have captured DV on a really old 6GB IDE drive and it worked flawlessly, even the drive was hopelessly slow (like 10-12MB/s read speed...)

So either you have an even slower drive (I can hardly believe that it won't be able to write/read 3.6MB/s) or it is fragmented like hell - defrag your drive and try to capture again (to DV-avi).

Several GB is not that big... you can get an 80GB HDD for around 50 Euro, so space shouldn't be a problem anymore!
As djidjo said before - you don't keep the DV, usually, you encode it to MPEG2, MPEG1, MPEG4, whatever you want (but encoding like this will give you much better results than encoding on the fly - the encoder gets the time it needs to produce good quality)