When capturing footage from my camera onto Movie Maker, the picture seems to lose quality. It is still watchable, but there are faint lines through it and the colour is a bit dull. Is it just like this whilst on computer, and will it fix itself when transfered to video? Or do I need to adjust something somewhere?
Any help is appreciated.

Digital video doesnt lose quality when transferred to a computer. The computer reads digital information, and your camera reads digitalinformation. There is no change in the format of the information. Could be your graphics card. Could be Movie Maker.

I think that editing programs display a lower-quality image within the program in order to facilitate editing and playback within the program. When you export to tape or as an AVI, it's in the original quality.

Unless you're talking about actual output from Windows Movie Maker...that program compresses to the extreme for web streaming. (I don't know a lot of the technical things, that's just from attempting to use the program.)

I'm not positive how movie maker works, but when you import the footage into the program it should save an unedited "master" Avi somewhere on the hardrive. If you open this file you can check the quality of the imported footage outside of movie maker.

Check and make sure there isnt a quality setting it might be saving the footage lower quality to save space. I dunno if Movie Maker is your only option, but the program isnt the greatest if you can try to get a pinnical program they make some nice consumer level editors... but if Movie Maker is your only choice just make sure there arnt import quality options or like Partical Man sed look for the avi on your hard drive. good luck

I think it has to do with the way your computer monitor is showing the video. Monitors have a higher resolution and colorspace than a standard TV (which video is meant to be shown on) Seems like the TV makes the raw video more colorfull side to side with a monitor. It's because the TV enhances or color corrects the video signal so that it looks as good on the tv as possible. So if your movie is ending up on a tv, keep that in mind. But if your planning to have it play on a computer or a digital projector, you might want to do some color tweaking to take advantage of their bigger RGB spaces. Editing software won't do it automatically, so you have to color correct the video yourself. I don't mean change the color hue, try changing the picture settings. I don't know if your Movie maker has color tweaking, but if it allows a little saturation/gain boost then you can already see a huge difference. Some others editors like Vegas Video have presets that change the video's colorspace(tv/studio RGB) to the monitor's colorspace(computer RGB) in 1 click. So with that set I look at the preview window and the video looks better. Or I lower the Gamma a little to make it look more film like. Sometimes I raise the saturation a lot for very dull video. When you display your tweaked video on a TV it might look great, or it could have some problems The biggest way to mess up is lowering the gamma too much, (it'll look way too dark on a TV), or having colors that are out of TV colorspace. TV and computer monitors are all different, but with a little "Color correction" your video will be fine.

quote:

---

Originally thought of by me:

....Damit Screenwriter..look at the first question, it had nothing to do with "Color correction" For real man, your basically talking to yourself. What is it with you and these pointless posts? It's like your turning into Kyle Johnson. Look man, if you dont put the keyboard down in 3 seconds then your not going to IHOP tommorow morning..

---

poptart hit it on the nose. If you export out to your camcorder again the raw footage will be as clear as thr original. Movie maker undoubtedly lowers the res on playback being that movie maker is designed for usage in very inferior computers...this is the average joe's NLE.

Now...the renders could look a little crappy, and theres nothing you can do about that besides an upgrade.

Cool, thanks guys.