[Steve R]

Right, I've searched and read some of the relevent posts on here and elsewhere but, a few days of trying later, I still can't get what I'd class as decent quality results from my mini DV camera.  Any advice much appreciated.....

The background:
Using a Sony mini DV camcorder
pc is just good enough for the job far as i can tell - 2.79GHz, 752Mb RAM
using firewire/i link
Got Adobe premiere elements 7

So far so good?

When I'm actually capturing or playing the tape from camcorder the quality looks great - as you'd expect.

There's not much I seem to be able to do with the capture settings other than switch between PAL and NTSC.  Could this be where it's all going wrong?

From here when I play/preview the project it obviously doesn't look as good anymore but it's only a preview so presumably won't be playing at any quality. 

However, the real problem seems to be with how I'm saving the finished project to my PC.  I've tried fiddling around with the usual things here: formats (mpeg, quicktime, etc.) upped the bitrates, upped the 'quality' slider to max.  However the end result when I play my new movie file is always crap.  Despite large file sizes and long rendering times I still get videos that look like someone's put a radiator down in front of the screen and/or pixelated and/or horrible compression effects on any quick movement (and even not so quick movement like people climbing!) 
 
The annoying thing is I know if I plugged my camera into my tv (analogue connection) and just taped it on a VCR it would look better than what I'm getting on pc which just can't be right!

Sorry that's all shockingly written - past bedtime 

[stom]

You could try following this guide on premier project setup;

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/premsetup.html

make sure you get the correct settings for interlaced/progressive footage depending on how you originally recorded it on your camera.  Also bear in mind that DV footage will always look pixelated when scaled up to play full screen on a computer monitor.  This is because your footage is captured at 720x576(Assuming your camera is DV and not HDV/AVCHD) and your computer monitor is running at a much higher resolution - say 1024x768 or higher.

[highrepute]

Stom is right about quality not being amazing with DV. I have a sony miniDV this is some footage captured with it is yours worse than this?

When you capture the video from the camera you should be able to watch the raw video, adobe must save it somewhere on your computer. You can check whether the quality is lost here or when you save the finished project.

I think there's talk about this elsewhere but saving as windowsmedia files for some reason gives small file size with good quality. that's what I do.

I'm sure someone who knows more will chip in with some better beta

[lagerstarfish]

Are you saving the imported video as DV (13 GB per hour)or compressing it to some other file type (eg WMV)? I'm assuming standard def and not high def.

You could always use Windows Movie Maker to import the DV footage and see if that gives you a better result.

[Steve R]

thanks alot for the help all and for the link to the guide stom.  I've learnt a fair bit more and played around so think I've got it to the stage where it's as good as it's going to be.  Which whilst still isn't great, it's good enough for my shoddy efforts for now. cheers