Full Screen Video Quality on Computer Monitor

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I am using an ATI All in Wonder 32mb 128 Pro video card. I am capturing video from a Sony CCD-TRV16 analog video camera. I am new to video editing but have spent countless hours researching. What are the best settings to use to capture the video so when I play it back on the full screen pc monitor the quality looks great. I want it to look the same as when I am playing the video straight from the camera. Before I capture, the video is crisp and clear and doesn't look computer generated, but after capturing, when I play it back on the full screen monitor you can notice the reduction in quality. When I play it back in a 50% screen it looks crisp. I have tried many different capture settings. (Mpeg1 and Mpeg2) give me the best qualities. Is this a capture issue or a display issue? Mabe the quality will never be as good?

-- Kirby Petersen (bluetuna@genevaonline.com), June 21, 2001

Answers

Capturing in raw AVI should give you the best best quality, but requires lot of hard disk space. Capturing in MPEG-2 is the next level of quality while MPEG-1 give poorer quality. The capture resolution is also important for full screen playback quality. If you capture at 352x240 then playing back at full screen does not give very good quality (simply because the computer monitor is 800x600 or 1280x960 or higher THE COMPUTER SCREEN IS AN EXCELLENT HDTV IN CASE NO ONE NOTICE).

What you see if simply a capture issue, not a display issue. There is one little trick that may help: reduce the monitor resolution to 640x480, full screen display quality will be much better for playing capture video.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), June 22, 2001.


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