On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 12:47:00PM +1000, Alan L Tyree wrote:
> I have recently acquired a digital videocam and want to do some
> capture/editing.
As do 1,000's of others, if the proliferation of software &
magazines is anything to go by. Check out the newsagents. There
are at least 4 magazines on digital video and related fields.
All windows-centric but the basic ideas apply.
> I have the VCR-HOWTO that seems to give basic capture info, but it
> seems to me that that must be analogue signals.
VCR != Digital Videocam.
> Anything special I need to know to do some basic editing, etc? What
> connections and software am I looking for?
There are two basic types of camcorders
1) Signal stored in Analogue format
2) Signal stored in Digital format
If your camcorder is: VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, S-VHS-C, Video 8, Hi8
then it's analogue. Mini-DV, Digital 8 and MPEG-4 are digital.
If you have an analogue camcorder, it will only output analogue
signals, the kind that work with TVs/VCRs etc. To get that into
a PC for editing you need a video capture card.
With digital camcorders, they (should) have outputs for both
analogue (TV etc) and digital devices. The most common format
for digital I/O is FireWire (ieee 1394) also known as I.Link
With a firewire system, data gets transferred from the camcorder
directly into your PC as a digital stream. The benefit of this is
that there's no loss of quality. Plus you get things like time/date
stamping etc. Also the PC can drive the camcorder through the link.
I haven't played with video under linux, and only seen programs like
VideoStudio and Premier (for Windoze), so I can't give personal
recommendations; but http://www.linuxvideo.com/ has a list of
programs that might help.
Editing video is a simple process:
- buy a computer with the fastest CPU & graphics card you can afford
- buy insane amounts of fast hard disk storage to boot
- plug camcorder into firewire port on PC
- suck video from camcorder onto hard disk
- spend copious amounts of time moving blocks of video around, putting
cheesy titles in, and running through the 100's of scene-fading options
available
- render the finished product as a movie
- output the movie to your output format of choice
> Also grateful for any info on sending video images to US relos that
> need to see it on NTSC systems.
The problem with sending video to the US is that they've never heard
of anything other than NTSC. But there are methods to send them video.
- get the PC to output video as NTSC. This is good if you've got an
output card, plus a VCR that can record in NTSC. (Beware! there are
2 NTSC standards: NTSC 4.4 and NTSC 3.6. Find out which one they
can cope with )
- if you don't have a tv output card, output the video back to
the camcorder. It's a digital transfer, so no loss of quality. Then
play the camcorder back onto a normal VCR. At this point you've got
a PAL tape. Find someone with a NTSC <-> Pal converter box and an
NTSC VCR, or pay a company to convert it for you.
- if they've got a DVD player, chances are it can run VCDs. If so
you can burn the movie as a VCD on a standard CD-Rom and not need
to use a VCR at all. (caveat: I've run NTSC DVDs and VCDs on my
player and had them come out as PAL. Not sure how well US players
cope with going the other way)
- if they've got a computer, burn it onto a CD-Rom as an AVI or
MPEG.
For more information search for Linux, DV and NLE.
(Digital Video & Non-Linear Editing)
Cheers
Paul Haddon
Technical Services Manager
Hartingdale Internet
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