Camcorder Vids Not Playing Well

PinkLady

Hi
I'd be really greatful if someone could help me with this.
I have bought a new camcorder. I've linked it to my laptop and have downloaded a couple of videos of the kids etc. However, the quality isn't very good and the speech is not in sync with the person talking on the screen.
Is it just because my laptop is old, or something else?

When I play the video in QuickTime Player it's very slow and grainy
I can't find the videos at all in Media Centre
and when I play them in Windows Photo Gallery it crashes!

My laptop is Vista and about 4 years old
Thanks

bat999

Hi
Try viewing them with a better media player such as VLC from here:- http://www.videolan.org/

PinkLady

Will do - thanks for that!

googler

What are you trying to achieve by dubbing them onto the computer? What's the eventual goal?

PinkLady

Hi
It's to put them onto the computer to watch them, and also to them transfer onto disk to watch on the DVD player.
I won't be editing them or anything like that
Thanks

PinkLady

I tried using that, but it was even slower on there. Not sure what's going on with it!

spakkker

"Is it just because my laptop is old, or something else" - Need more info ,camcorder model , laptop spec.-cpu , memory
If the camcorder uses sd cards it could be a slow sd card. It could be a rubbish camcorder, can you film in different standards eg hd or vga ?? If it's hd video it could be your lappy isn't up to it.

googler

Why not just transfer them straight to DVD, then play them back on the computer from the discs?

ddoris

Do you mean play them back all out of synch,low-quality, grainy and slow from dvd ?

googler

ddoris wrote: »

Do you mean play them back all out of synch,low-quality, grainy and slow from dvd ?

No.

Maybe I'm too 'old school', but I come from the train of thought that says "Plug output from Camcorder into Input of DVD recorder, press Record on DVD Recorder, and press play on Camcorder"

All this faff with Quicktime and Media Player seems like a blind alley to me.

I'm perhaps assuming the Camcorder to be a tape-based one - for you haven't told us yet what type it is.

paddyrg

What you're trying to do sounds so much simpler than the actual process and what the software etc is doing under the covers that you will always hit problems of one sort out another if trying to do it on the cheap!

If your camera is either MiniDV or HDV tapes only then you should connect to it via firewire and forsake all other connectors. That will be by miles the best results. My hunch is that you have either got a camera that plugs in via USB or are using a USB adaptor, and the results will be significantly poorer for it. All the USB adaptors do the MPEG encoding in hardware, usually with some terrible bit of driver software to deal with. This may cause all kinds of woes. The good news is that the sound probably isn't really out of sync, just that your computer is incapable of playing it back smoothly. video editing and processing is extremely processor hungry, although a good video card will help. If your laptop wasn't top end 4 years back, and you have installed other stuff on the machine since, it's likely to just not have enough grunt to soft decode the MPEG4 files fast enough to watch. Try copying and playing one on a newer machine and see if it still wheezes

by the way googler above has a good suggestion - it is the fastest and most robust solution for non- MiniDV or HDV tapes. I often use analogue stages for processing video if I'm in a rush.