First off, I apologize for my lack of proper terminology, but i'm just getting started with video. Anyways, I recently tried capturing video from my camera onto my computer. Everything works, but the problem is the quality of video on the computer is horrible and it skips frames. It is not nearly as clear as when i play the video straight from my camera onto the t.v. I'm using the capturing software that came with the camera and the cable i use plugs into the usb port. Where is the weak link...cable, software?? or is this as good as its gonna get with the camera and computer i have?? Also, ten minutes of video is over 3 gigs...is this normal?? Any help would be appreciated! thanks!!!

video eats up a bunch of space. its probably your moniter.

yea video east up lots of space i would reccomend that if you know your computer pretty good that you buy a portable harddrive to put all of your video on it so that way you wont waste all your mem on the computer...just my 2 cents

as for the monitor i have no idea it could be the software

First off, the computer DOES have a mini compression issue for playing back video in REAL TIME on a computer monitor which shows video differently than your tv or your lcd of your camera. It's going to look jerky,broken up and too fast at times. But thats just part of the 'digital process' of viewing on your computer. Its fine. Don't panic.
If you have firewire from your camera to computer, switch to that for video transfer---it's faster, cleaner.
And then there's your editing/hard drive storage. The quality of your editing program and the compression it uses also effects the playback of the video.........go into your 'preferences' under program and you can change the quality of the compression and playback and TRANSFER.

You might need more ram and a better video card

My guess would be the cable from your computer to the camcorder, when i got mine and first started i had the same problem. The cables they send with those things are crap, get a cable called Firewire (IEEE 1394) if your computer has a firewire port. It looks a little different from a usb port but similar, if you computer is newer it will probably have it. If not try usb 2.0 which is another type of cable. Try looking at walmart, circuit city, staples somewhere like that.

So if I burn a dvd and play it back on the t.v. it should look better?? Currently I am using a usb connection. Is firewire that much better that it is worth getting? My computer has the firewire connection and has 2 gigs of ram. I am not exactly sure on the video card though. As far as editing, I have just been using windows movie maker to get started. I assume this is pretty bottom of the line software as it came with the computer. What is a good program to edit with?? Thanks for all the help!

Did the usb cable come with your camcorder,also is it thin and flimsy? The problem is, your usb cable is not able to transmit enough information at a certain speed to make the video quality good. If that is the case and you do have the firewire port then i would get the fire wire cable. When i first started i used the tiny little usb cable provided with the camcorder and the video quality was horrible but when i got the firewire it was improved dramatically. But before you go out and buy the firewire burn a dvd and see how good it looks and then you will know if it was your computer compressing the video for playback on your computer. And one last thing windows movie maker is an excellent program for beginners it is what i first used. But after a while you will realize its limitations. Learn all the ins and outs of movie maker before you go and buy a different video edititing program, for example i now use vegas movie studio 7.0 and it is alot more complicated than movie maker, but knowing how things worked from using movie maker it didnt take me that long to get used to vegas movie studio.