Friends,


Is there any difference between the various Editing Programs when it comes to the best resolution at which each of them can capture the DV footage into the digital files? I captured the DV from a Sony Camcorder (TRV33) using the Adobe Premiere Pro software, but I am not happy with the quality of the captured video. I know that Mini DV is not the best quality, but I would like to know if the Adobe Premiere Pro has an option to specify "the resolution at which the vidio has to be captured in to digital files".

As I understand from these furums, we have a lot of Premiere Pro gurus around here. Could someone please suggest? Though I have not used Avid, I understood from its user interface, that there is a provision to specity at what ratio you want to capture the DV (1:1, 1:2, 1:3 etc). Is there any such provision in Premiere Pro?

Avid will capture OMF files at different compression resolutions to make smaller files.

Final Cut and Premiere will capture in different file formats to make size smaller, not necessarily resolutions.

For example, Motion JPEG is a very compressed file format that will make the media smaller on the harddrive, and it's a different file format than Quicktime.

On my computer, in Premiere, under the Project Menu there is a project settings tab. if you click on it it will say Video, and it allows for me to choose 2 different kinda of compression. I'm sure if you install more compressors, you can get other options in that menu. Check the Help guide on how to install new compressors.

The compression settings RFranco referred to are for video rendering, not capture. This setting determines how the rendered files are created.

The captured footage is unchanged when captured from the cam in Pro. while i am aware of Avid and FCP having low res options for saving space when editing, there is no such option that i am aware of in PPro as of yet (if there is i havent found it, i havent had a need for this yet). However, since you are looking for increased quality anyway, this really isnt the issue.

So - what exactly is the issue? The raw footage is looking not so clean? How have you determined this? Are you looking at the footage in the reference monitor in premiere? Have you edited at all, resulting in renders? Have you looked at the footage dumped back out to tape? How about the raw AVI file in media player?

Heres my thoughts:

1 - if you are looking at the footgage inside PPro, check your monitor settings (the triangle next to the display) and choose highest. See if that looks clearer.

2 - below the monitor, set the size from "fit" to 50% or 100% - you will only see a portion of the screen, but you can see the resolution better. When the program interprets the clip to an odd size (like 37.8% or something) it creates artifacts. They dont affect the actual footage though.

3 - If you HAVE rendered something and it looks crappy, are you using 1.0 or 1.5? I have seen 1.0 produce some really bad compression chunks in black areas from 1.0. Seems to be remedied in 1.5. That could be it too perhaps, although there is no fix besides upgrading to 1.5.

4 - Look at the raw footage in your capture folder in media player. How does it look there?

5 - finally, dump it back to tape and see if its the same. Odds are it will be, its more likely that there is an issue in the way the program is interpreting the footage for display.

Dont forget that unless the quality is being dumbed down (like mentioned above) the footage generally cant be changed on capture because the data rate is too high. Its straight in raw data DV stream. The exception would be that there is some gamma change done to DV footage in FCP to adjust for mac gamma settings, however i am uncertain if this occurs on the raw footage or is induced by the software on the fly.

Hope that helps