Hello everyone

Hope you can help me, I have a Sony mini DV camcorder, and I have been using Windows Movie Maker to put the video footage from the camcorder to my computer, I have contacted Sony about the quality reducing when recording it
to the computer and they said it is because windows movie maker reduces the resolution, so they said use a program that imports the footage in full resolution, so does anybody now any software that can do this, I would like it to be
free software, but if not then that is OK.

Thanks for your help

Many thanks
Charlie

are you using USB or firewire.

i have a sony DV camera, firewire is loads better then USB for image quality.

Pinnacle Studio - latest version is V10, and is only about £50.

tried this? http://www.stoik.com/utils/capturer.htm

i'm with robant on this one - pinnacle studio 10, for full quality use DV capture, if you want to eventually burn it to DVD then capture in mpeg mode.

Windows Movie Maker can still capture in DV format with no loss in quality (at least mine does) just dont capture using WMV format

Always capture via firewire as it is basically a file transfer from the camera to the PC. This will give perfect quality, but the file sizes are large (13Gb an hour) then edit this with Ulead, Pinnacle, Adobe, etc and save out as an MPEG2 file, ready to burn onto a DVD.

I have used Windows Movie Maker and all seems fine. Picture quality when converted to DVD seems reasonable, the only thing I find is that the sound is very digitalised and if noisy sounds pretty rank to be honest.

It seems to take forever to convert the video, and an eternity to convert the sound.

Is Pinnacle ok for sound ??? as this is my major problem with WMM

I concur that if you have WMM set up correctly there is no quality loss as it just shifts the uncompressed AVI from DV tape to a big file on your PC.

What you then do with it will determine the quality of the finished product.

If using pinnacle and planning to output to dvd rather than back to dv tape one can capture in mpeg2 from the outset.

Only if you don't intend editing anything. MPEG2 is a mastering format and not an intermediate/working format.