Need Help Identifying Problem (Pictures Included)

[teajay]

Hello

I just purchased a (very) cheap Samsung miniDV Camcorder (it's a VP-D381i) and after capturing some footage I noticed a problem with the way that the capture footage looks. It seems as though the frame hasn't been properly aligned so that there are very small black bars on the top, left side and bottom of the image. It is a PAL camcorder and it has PAL 16:9 mode as well and the problem shows on both normal (4:3) mode and 16:9 mode although in 16:9 mode it also shows a line of distortion along the left side of the frame. I'll put up some pictures now to show you what it's like. The photo has been compressed using JPEG but it's dimensions have been unchanged (720x576.)


I am going to call up Samsung Tech Support and the store I bought it from but I wanted to get some feedback here so that I know how to more precisely describe the issue to the tech support or sales people. Even if it turns out that it's a flaw in the design of the camera and even a replacement would have the same issue, I would still want to keep it as it does what I need it to do.

Thanks in advance

Tysen

[teajay]

Oh I thought I better mention that I tried capturing the footage using two separate firewire ports and two separate cables on two separate computers and also tried using Premiere Elements 7.0 capture utility and WinDV and in all combinations the same frame issue arises so it's definitely the camera. It doesn't show up on the camera's LCD or when using A/V out onto a TV.

[Steve Grisetti]

Hi, Teejay. Welcome to Muvipix!

This kind of noise around the edges of your video frame is very common. In fact, all camcorders do it -- and there's not much you can do about it. It's just the nature of video.

The good news is that you'll only see it in your video editing program. Once you output your video to DVD and play it on a TV, that edge will be cut off.

[Chuck Engels]

It's called Overscan and as Steve says it is common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan

[teajay]

Thanks for your replies guys. I just wasn't sure if DV cameras had overscan but I guess they do. I still see the black borders on the left top and bottom if I view them on my Xbox 360 but if I play them on my PS3 or my old DVD player and set my TV to "16:9" rather than "Just Scan" the black areas disappear. If I export to a .mov or .wmv file for view on other computers is there a way to automatically crop my edited project or will I have to crop the overscan out on each clip as I add it? I guess I could export the edited end product to DV-AVI and then import it into VirtualDub and crop it then compress it to whatever format I want to export to rather than have to individually crop each segment as I add it to the timeline.

[Chuck Engels]

You can add the crop effect in Premiere Elements, but depending on the export format you really might not need it.

[RJ Johnston]

I have a Samsung and it also has a black border on the left and bottom, but not the top. I have a different model miniDV camcorder. I called Samsung and had a big runaround with them. My JVC miniDV camcorder does not have any borders. Anyway, Samsung support very rudely handled my situation and never called me back like they said they would. As long as the aspect ratio is correct, then Samsung will tell you that there is nothing wrong.

One thing that these black borders do is make it difficult to do automatic color correction and image stabilization. I would have returned the camcorder, but it was so inexpensive and the colors were really good and the camcorder is very easy to use.

[teajay]

Yeah I only paid $250 Australian Dollars which is only about $150 US Dollars so it was very cheap. I think that they are phasing out their miniDV camcorders so it was heavily discounted. There are now no entry level miniDV camcorders in Australia. The next miniDV camcorder up is the Canon HV40 which is over $AU1500.