We recently bought a Canon DC330 DVD camcorder. It seems to work fine - we are happy with it as far as it goes. However when we tried to create a dvd with the accompanying corel software bundle - the program crashed and it took us some time to eventually realise that the software was incompatible with our system; XP SP3! So we have got some new software specific for the job of editing and creating our dvd's... - Enter Cyberlink's 'Power Director 7'... Looks great, seems to work ok too... BUT - the resulting dvd's we create with it are poor reproductions when compared to the original version on the mini dvds played from the camcorder to the tv... There are several ' could be's : it might be that our processor of the PC is too slow - it's only 1.666Ghz and the software actually recommends 2.2Ghz or more? It could be that the 'on board' graphics chipset is just not up to the job and we're thinking of buying a 'slot in graphics card' though we don't know whether this would make any real difference? Or it could be the software itself being faulty, though I doubt that. It could be the way we capture the videos - the camcorder came supplied with a mini usb cable to connect to the pc; not ideal - but even when we simply put the finalized mini dvd disc in the pc dvd drive and capture from there we still get the same problem in the end... It could be the file format we are saving as - isn't right maybe (Mpeg2)... We can save in Mpeg4-portable but the description favoured Mpeg2 for DVDs. What would you folks recommend? The resolution is sketchy and generally poor when edited and re-recorded back onto a normal sized dvd disk. There is a possible clue to the problem in that when we watch a mini dvd on our laptop (vista) or the PC screen (XP) (ie. straight out of the camcorder) – it has this same poor resolution as that on a dvd created and played from the dvd player to the tv... Whereas the quality from the mini dvd played in the camcorder to the tv is excellent... so maybe it is really about the graphics card issue? We'd really appreciate your help & advice on this! Thank you Element.

why not uninstall SP3, I have had nothing but problems with that on many PC's? I set all my PC's to do a custom install of Critical up-dates, therefore bypassing SP3 Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers

I suspect your problem is your software limiting the final-cut resolution. I'm not sure of the data rate of your camera when it encodes the video stream onto disc, but whatever it is, if your video-editing program has a lower encoding rate (expressed in K/bits per second) then you will lose quality as the video is resampled and recompressed. Good quality videos can be produce using data rates between 5000Kbps and 10,500 Kbps (figures rounded), high quality at 25000kbits (25megabits or 25mbps) to high-definition beyond this (even up to 80mbps=very high resolution). For processing power for the mid rates you would need a dual-core Pentium running at least 2GHz or a single core at 2.5GHz. Personally I have edited and transferred good quality mpeg2 videos on to a theatre screen at 5mbps (5000kbps) using a triple-core AMD at 2.1GHz with no obvious degrading of the picture after editing. Check the specifications of your editing program for data encoding rate and if it won't encode at at least 5mps then find one that will. Some editors offer varying rates of quality for encoding. For example there's little point in re-encoding a VHS tape at a very-high data rate, so an "average" quality setting would do. But for your application you want a transfer rate at least equal to your camera's "hiqhest-quality" setting. Stay in the mpeg2 format, this is necessary for dvd encoding. Check this: http://www.dvinfo.net//conf/dvd-web...