Video quality from digital camcorder?

I am in the process of using Pinnacle Studio 8 to create a DVD of content recorded on a digital camcorder. I have more or less finished the first DVD and created the files for it, so I could preview them before actually burning (loading video_ts.vob into PowerDVD). I notice that the video all seems to be fairly fuzzy. It did not look like this when viewed directly from the camcorder onto a TV. Is this simply because I am viewing it on a computer? Will it look "right" when actually played on a TV again? Or have I lost something during the process? It *said* it was being created @ 100% quality (as I intended), but it doesn't actually look like it. The picture just isn't crisp on the computer.

Hi, your video should look great on the computer in DV format before converting to mpeg. If there is a quality loss then its due to the mpeg conversion settings. There are many ways to do this. maa

Well, the wierd thing is that even the DV avi didn't look at all that great either.

do you mean INTERLACING? those combing-effect in moving areas?

No, its not the interlacing (although I definately noticed that when watching the AVI. Its just that everything seems fuzzy. I don't know... I may get a chance to burn a test copy tonight and see if I'm just nuts.

Was it shot indoors? Low light can be the cause of fuzzy and grainy images.

ok, then. Please post a Screenshot. Because noone really knows your problem.

As long as the aspect ratios match (4:3 on standard TV, 16:9 on widescreen) no resizing is needed. DVD players use 720x480 resolution. On a computer monitor you can actually see all 345,600 pixels. But to display it you would need a luminance channel bandwidth of 13.5MHz (the same as the sampling rate), but NTSC limits luminance bandwidth to 4.5MHz (and color, if you use composite, to 500KHz Pb, 1500KHz Pr). Most sets have even lower luminance bandwidth, typically 3.58MHz - almost 4:1 reduction in detail.

another reason the source can look worse on a pc monitor (assuming your checking it fullscreen) is the display is scaling the image alot larger as I'd imagine your monitor res would be at least 1024x768, as opposed to the SD resolution of a tv screen.

please remind, that TV are painting the picture using interlacing and the camcorder uses this way of recording the video, too. But your PC-Monitor paints the picture Progressive, so interlaced DV-Video WILL look worse on PC. another thing may be, thate the DV-Directshow-Decoder only decodes the video at half size. to adjust this, click right on the videopicture in mplayer2, select properties, advanced, dv-decoder, full, as standard, ok, ok, ok.