Video Performance Question . . .

[cupholder8]

I do alot of video editing with skateboarding and have encountered some minor problems when exporting movies. Whenever I capture the footage from my camera, the trick that is being done, which is crystal clear on the camera, becomes blurry when I capture the clip and save it to my computer. Basically, the shutter speed on the camera SEEMS like it's too slow, but in effect, it's perfectly fine when played back on the tape itself . . . it's when I capture and save it onto my computer that it becomes blurry and ghostly looking during parts where the motion is fast (when the board flips around quickly or a friend flails his arms). Frames overlap each other and the background shows through , almost as if the opacity is set to 50%

I have sent the same video clips that appear blurry on my computer to friends online, and they send me back still frames from the clip that are crystal clear and not blurry. So it seems to me that the problem doesn't lie in the camera or in the capturing process, but more along the lines of my computer performance. I've included some specs on my computer:
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 2 MX 400
RAM: 256mb DDR SDRAM
Processor: 1.7 ghz Pentium 4
Hard Drive: 80 gig

My question is this: what do I need to do to fix this problem? Would a better video card work? Is it my RAM that is too low? Could it even be my firewire card?

I appreciate any help you folks can give me. I've done just about all I can do address the problem, and have turned up unsuccessful.

Thanks,
Danny

 

[Tahir2]

It might be a software or driver issue rather than hardware?

However it sounds to me you are dropping frames, I am not too sure on this but it might be that you do not have enough resources devoted to your task as well.

When you are capturing video to your hard drive is anything else running in the background. You do not mention the OS or software either.

 

[cupholder8]

I'm positive I'm not dropping frames, I sometimes have programs running in the background but it doesn't make a difference when I do not.

I run on Windows XP and I use Adobe Premiere 6.5

 

[Tahir2]

OK you state that you send the video to your friends but they give you back still frames that are not blurry at all.

Your original date on your HD cannot be at fault then so that rules out the firewire card going by that logic.

I think it is a software issue, whereby something is limiting the playback of your media which sounds fine. It could be the graphics card not having the necessary power but I would think that would only apply if your playback software was using the hardware features of your GF MX which I know has very little Video Acceleration.

Your CPU speed sounds OKish to me.

It could be the format you have the date compressed to and when it is decoded it produces these blurry images... errrrr............ sorry just trying to give you some ideas.

I would try the following first:

See if the problem is repeatable on other software

Lower the settings of the video taken from your camera to your PC and playing it back.

 

[Fruitfrenzy]

The problem is interlacing.

Video sequences are made up of interleaved fields at 60 fields per second for NTSC or 50 fields per second for PAL.

When you play the video on the computer using a graphics card that doesn't have fancy deinterlacing pairs of fields are displayed together as frames. When there is motion between the 2 fields you get combing which looks like consecutive frames have been blended.

A simple method of deinterlacing is to throw away every other line of video. If you are scaling the video down then this makes sense. Otherwise there are a whole host of other methods you can use which preserve more detail.

Depending on what you are planning to do with the video there are many packages that can perform the deinterlacing for you.

For example when I am going from DV video to MPEG I use TMPGEnc Plus which has options for deinterlacing the video as it encodes. Tools like VirtualDub can also do it.

For playback, graphics cards such as the DX9 ATI cards (9500 and up) have hardware deinterlacing that looks very nice though if you deinterlace in software you won't need that.