DVX100a - Sports shooting and low quality capture

[ecentric]

I have a DVX100a and I have been shooting some community football games. I was shooting on scene 1, which is 60i, shutter speed 60, ND 1/8. The footage looks decent on camera and when viewed on the TV, but I cannot seem to get a crisp capture in Final Cut express.

Does anyone know if I should be using different camera settings for sports, and is there a specific capture setting that I should be using to capture full quality in FCE?

 

[Alex H.]

As long as your capture and sequence settings are set to DV NTSC 48KHz, you're fine.

Are you judging this issue based on how the video looks on your computer in Final Cut's viewer and canvas? Those are definitely the last two places you'd ever want to look to discern video quality. Those players are dumbed down... it down-rezzes on the fly to allow for realtime preview and the color space is a terribly inaccurate proxy.

Try this: keep your camera or capture deck connected by firewire, and take its analog video out to a TV (and the audio outs to some speakers... in the DV/FIrewire world audio follows video). Make sure that FCP is set to VIEW>External Video>All Frames. Now... does it look better on the TV? It should.

But a consumer TV is also not really reliable for color correction and other critical decisions. The best tool is a porfessional boradcast monitor, properly calibrated.