You may have read that I put together a Video Editing PC last week...
Well today I finally got to grips with the technology that I'd built. Prior to this, I had been using the USB1.1 streaming option on the Sony DV Camera that work has, thinking that this was the easiest option for capturing the video.
How wrong I was. After spending several hours going through various tapes, capturing footage that the tutors had taken - I soon realised how poor quality it was. I'm talking Web quality prior to editing and exporting the video.
However, a few minutes ago I got the camera back in the workshop, so I decided to utilise the new Firewire capture card I'd purchased. Immediately Premiere Elements was playing ball, whereas with the USB streaming, only Movie Maker would capture anything.
The quality is insanely better. OK it's still limited to the DV PAL resolution (720x576), but it's a lot lot better, without any stupid compression or pixelation.
So now I've got to re-capture the video so that it's of a decent quality, ready for editing...