Video quality reduced after transfer from camcorder to PC using USB?

I read this page about transfering video from a camcorder to PC

http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/t...

it says that because its a transfering process, the quality should be the same. however, the quality was greatly reduced. wen i view the video full screen on my monitor, i cant see anyone's face clearly.

after transfer, 1 min of vid is about 4MB on my hardrive

my camcorder is Panasonic PV-GS39. and i just used a USB cable which i often use for my digital camera.

does anyone know how to transfer from my camcorder to my pc without losing the video's quality?

Streaming the videos should not reduce the quality of the videos streamed unless there is packet loss even then there would be loss of frames and not in quality of the video.....It might be that the video that you are shooting from the camcorder is set to low quality.....try getting it with a high quality on the camcorder or better try playing the video at a much smaller size than the one now and you will be able to get much better quality.......Hope that makes sense!

What program are you transferring it to? If you are using a non-linear editing program, you ought to be able to adjust the capture settings, which in turn control quality and compression. Also, just as a side note, firewire is a way better way to transfer than USB.

If you do not have a non-linear editing program, I suggest you look into them. They are fairly in-expensive. For ex. Pinnacle makes one for PC users for $49.

Hope this helps

Dontae Housley
A/V Equipment Sales
tapeworksdontae@sbcglobal.net
www.tapeworkstexas.com

The best way is to use the Firewire (IEEE1394) port on the camcorder to transfer to the computer. Windows Movie Maker can handle this or any of the consumer video editing programs such as Premiere Elements or Pinnacle Studio. This will produce a file that is 200MB per minute!!! If your computer does not have Firewire, then buy an inexpensive PCI card. If you don't want to open your computer than an external capture device such as Pinnacle Studio Movie Box will work through USB 2.0 with Windows XP. Do not capture from the camera's USB port.

How you transfer the video to your computer should not play a great role. USB or firewire is simply how fast the link can transfer data to your machine. The only caveat I have seen is that your hard drive cannot be one of the older 5400 RPM models.
What file format you capture the video is just as important. You can choose the AVI file type which suffers very little compression while others like mpg are compressed file types where you do lose quality.