I have recently taken 10 hours of miniDV tapes to a professional studio that uses all Mac hardware and software. The purpose was to capture to a hard disk all the "good" video so that I could then begin the edit process to create DVD's and web videos.

At the studio, we captured the good video clips to an external hard drive (that I bought and was formatted for a Mac). As we captured the video, we occasionally played back certain clips, and all the clips were in outstanding video quality. By the way, the capture was done with no compression and at full frame rate, so the video clips are huge.

When I brought the hard disk home, I connected it to both my Windows XP, SP2 laptop and my desktop (using MacDrive to mount the drive to the Windows OS). However, in both cases, when I tried to play the QuickTime video clips using the QuickTime video player (version 7.4.5), the quality of the video is horrible. It's very grainy and nothing like what I saw when we played them off the same hard disk at the studio.

Any suggestions? The version of QuickTime that the studio was using was QT 7.4.1.

Walt Powell