How do I improve the quality of video clips copied to my PC?

Well things might be murky because of your memory. You need alot above and belond. Like 15 gigs.These low end editting programs only capture your footage in a short assed end circut. Any program with it,s buttons will make you render things in order to see them.

That camera is great actually. I had an older version but am onto mini DV. Actuallyif serious panasonic mini DV's with a leica lens are on sale now.About 888. The buy of the century.3ccd as well. 540 working horizontal lines.

Sorry you might need to be using a high quality firewire from your camera to the computer.I found final cut express a worthy inexpensive program but for realdabbling go via a much more expensive avid express.

Have you viewed the camera's recorded output on a regular TV? If so, how does that compare tio what you get from your PC? And how are you feedin' the video to your 'puter? Do you have a capture-capable graphics adapter or dedicated video capture device?

You might wanna delve into the documentation for your software to see if you can adjust frame rates, gamma, color balance, contrast, and sharpness. Odds are you can prolly tweak your existin' software some - mebbe enough to make the results acceptable. From the description of your 'puter, it oughtta be up to the task of simple-to-moderate video editin' - I've had fair results with an old 550Mhz PIII machine runnin' Win98, older (later-'90's vintage) video-editin' software, 384MB of PC100 memory and a relatively slow 20Gig hard drive. And a video capture card.

Do you mean RAM or HARDDRIVE?

I use a program called Showbiz dvd by arcsoft - would work better if I had a better camera (other than my digital) seems to do a nice job taking the file off a dvd from my dvd burner and making mpg2 movies.
I have adobe CS but just trying to learn.