i have shot some concert video tonight, in a indoor venue which has good lighting. It consist of a pianist playing on stage and i, being in the audience was shooting 10 meters away. (I zoom in a bit to put the pianist into the whole frame). I used manual focus[i pointed the cam to the piano and the auto push buttom for a few second at my seat] and auto lock at first but eventually it seems to look too dark so i disengaged that and turn up the exposure.

After getting home i captured the footage using Final Cut Express. The resulting video looks very disappointing. I see lines where motion occur(interlaced problem?) and the outline of some objects (i.e. the piano) is not sharp at all. the general impression looks like a very low resolution video. It doesn't improve after i converted it into a DVD or a divx file. When i look at the video again in the cam's screen it looks alot better. But i am not sure if the small size LCD did contribute an illusion or not.

I wonder what's the problem. It is very different to my test footage yesterday under natural lighting with people walking around indoor. [auto lock and auto focus]

please help. This is my first time on this camera.

How does the video look if you directly connect the cam to a TV?
If it looks good then the quality decreases during transfer to the PC.
If it looks already bad then the recording is already bad.

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Sektionschef

Panasonic SDR-S100
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You might get some better responses if you give us more detail, like for example what camcorder are you using?




Rich

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I am using a Sony VX2000 as i am putting the post in this forum

The VX is known to be a very good performer in low light, even with auto focus. Make sure you are in full auto and use the SPOT LIGHT function for Theatre work. The auto focus is probably better than you are... I know that's how mine was.

If you are seeing interlacing artifacts it's because you are viewing on a PC monitor. How does it look straight from the cam into a TV?

You don't see a flashing "ND" in the viewfinder, do you? Make sure your ND filters are off.

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Adam
Proud owner of 8 Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

an update to the problem.

just plugged the cam to my TV. Turns out the video is good.

Now i have to figure out why the captured footage has very serious interlace artifact. It's particularly disturbing when something is in motion. lines are clearly seen and the object(person) appears blurred.

I pull out a store bought classical piano DVD for comparison. for that one i can tell there's artifact but it's very subtle, unlike mine which totally distorted the picture.

I am trying to do a dv stream file from the footage(and then burn into a DVD with my PC) using final cut express with the setting change to progressive. See if that would take care of the issue.

a final update to the situation

I dumped the whole idea of using final cut express. my ibook G4 is slightly below its system requirement. Since i can't fix that it's impossible for me to eliminate that as a potential cause of the problem (no matter how unlikely that sounds). Time to go back to my Desktop PC.

after going thru a few forums i've found a free software called winDV

used it for capturing. The resulting AVI is free of problem. then further converted it to formats that i needed using TMPGEnc

problem solved