Digital Video Recording, External Solution

poopinmymouth

Ok, I want to start making more video tutorials. The thing that keeps me from doing it, is that camtasia/fraps/hypercam all slow down my pc too much. So I want an external solution.

Ideally, and what I don't even think exists, would be a hard drive enclosure with S-video in that had real time encoding built in. So I could just output from my S-video port, and buy a ginormo hard drive to stick in it.

My current plan, if you guys don't know of something better, is to buy a miniDV camcorder with analog input, which is around 330 dollars for the cheapest I could find. It just seems like if I could find a product that doesn't have a lens or a light or a CCD, I could pay less, but so far my searches have been futile. All the miniDV VCR's I found were pricey.

Also, I don't want to use Tivo or similar, because there is no easy way to get the video back off, and I don't want to have to burn a DVD every time I need video back. I want to be able to put the video back onto my laptop via firewire, not a disposable media.

Any help is greatly appreciated, and will ensure many future tutorials. 8-)

Rwolf

Bleh, my only idea was the Tivo-ish stand alone DVD Player/Burner.

Weiser_Cain

How much memory in your machine? If you can output s-video why not use another computer to capture the video? It wouldn't even have to be a particularly good pc.

thomasp

is it possible at all to forward your computer screen to an external device AND still have a usable display on your monitor without some rather custom hardware? the TV output solutions i know shut off your main display during operation. and the dv-solution only seems to work in certain applications, that support it (premiere/vegas video editing, etc).

some professional video editing boards come with a playout-utility, that itself isn't application dependant. that would probably be a rather pricey, non-laptop-compatible solution, tho.

LoTekK

If you have a second computer handy, I would go with Weiser_Cain's solution. I've recorded all kinds of stuff using that route, using S-Video output into an ATI All-in-Wonder on a second (much slower) computer running Fraps.

It's typically been used for recording gameplay videos for various purposes, something that I absolutely could not do with any recording software running on the same machine while still maintaining a reasonable framerate.

Eric Chadwick

I've used S-video out to a DV cam to record, and it isn't pretty. You get a low 720x480 resolution, the noisiness of DV compression, interlacing, and bad edges. So your recompression sucks because the source is already heavily compressed, you have to knock out the interlacing which eats up small UI text which is already munged anyhow because of the low-res, and you have to crop off the black edges. Autodesk's Cleaner is pretty good for fixing all that stuff, but not _that_ good. I'm looking forward to more of your stuff, keep it up.

Oh yeah, meant to add that there are VGA capture cards out there, if you have a second PC to record to. The card simply records whatever VGA signal is being sent. An example...
http://www.pixelsmart.com/vga.html

Downsizer

I second what EC said. I run s-video out at 800x600 to a tv, and from there you can use anything to record it. DVDRec, DVR, VHS, whichever. The issue is the low resalution. Why not shoot Gnomon an email and ask how they pull it off? I know it's semi-timelapse, and you may be able to configure a PC recording software to only shoot every other frame or every 3 etc, to lessen the performance hit.

Use setup the display as 'clone' and you should be fine. I have an X-FI Platinum breakout box, so I run optical straight to my reciver for audio. You can just record an mp3 and merge the audio later.

poopinmymouth

The difference between myself and Gnomon is that I don't charge eighty dollars for my tutorials, no anything actuall. I am not willing to spend more than about 300-400 dollars on this, so even another computer is a no go, because I don't currently have a second one. I was unaware of the VGA capture cards Eric, I'll check that out if I do go that route.

If I make some recordings with a DVcam and it goes awfully, I'll be returning it for a refund and try something else.

Jeff Parrott

Well you live right by Canoga Park. Which I hear is where all the porn companies are based. Just go down there and see if you can sit on your laptop while they're filming.

Eric Chadwick

Here's a sample of DV-recorded-then-compressed video. Works otay.
http://www.whatif-productions.com/video.htm
(not the Gobbler one tho, that's pre-rendered)

One of the Discreet demo guys told me how they compress their 3ds Max vids, which look pretty good. Might be worth a re-examination of the TechSmith route, at least for the UI parts. I'm planning to go his route on my next vid.

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Topic: How does Discreet capture/compress their demo vids? (1 of 11), Read 171 times New
Conf: Discreet Take 5 (Off-topic discussion)
From: Eric Chadwick
Date: Monday, October 18, 2004 01:22 PM

I've been watching the 3ds max 7 videos here...
http://www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/3dsmax.php?id=870
...and have been impressed by the quality of the ~520kbps WMV files.

Can anyone enlighten me to the methods used to create their screen captures?

Looks to me like it was captured directly with a fast PVR, or maybe Camtasia Studio was used to capture the screenusing the TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (since it's lossless), at 10 fps or so (the framerate of the finished vids), then this was re-compressed with Cleaner into the two available formats QT and WMV.

What about screen size... what resolution was it captured at? I'm guessing it was captured higher, then scaled down to the 640x480 output res with Cleaner. The UI text looks very crisp, but anti-aliased too. The UI buttons look small enough that the screen resolution was probably set >= 1024x768.

Any special Cleaner options to keep the fairly-static menus sharp, while allowing periodic updates of the oft-changing viewport?

I need to capture and compress some 3ds max UI navigation, intercut with fullscreen caps of a game engine, to explain how we export our game assets. I've been thinking of compressing the UI caps with TSCC or somesuch (for best screen compression), then using a Windows Media ASX file to intercut those with my WMV9-compressed game engine footage (for best FMV compression).

But if I can get good quality with a single codec, that would be preferrable. We cannot use QT unfortunately, a possible client prefers WMV. QuickTime is great because it allows multiple codecs within a single MOV file... but Windows Media does not.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Eric

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Topic: How does Discreet capture/compress their demo vids? (2 of 11), Read 151 times New
Conf: Discreet Take 5 (Off-topic discussion)
From: Shawn Hendriks
Date: Monday, October 18, 2004 01:31 PM

Hi Eric,

I captured edited and compressed the max 7 feature videos. Your guess is pretty accurate. I used camtasia to do the capture using their codec at 1024x768. I then ran it through cleaner XL to convert it to windows media 9 and quicktime. The videos were dowsized to 640x480 at 10 frames a second. I will often take the framerate even lower but then you can get weird smearing effects. As far as settings in cleaner I didn't do anything special, just fiddled a little with the windows media settings to get a good quality/size compromise.

Shawn

poopinmymouth

Thanks for that info Eric, however I have a feeling that they weren't running that on a laptop, which I will be. Normally hard drive performance is irrelevant when I'm working, but with camtasia, it's too much.

ScoobyDoofus

What about purchasing a fast Firewire hard-drive and outputting to that if going to your local disk is tying up your I/O subsystem?

poopinmymouth

[ QUOTE ]
What about purchasing a fast Firewire hard-drive and outputting to that if going to your local disk is tying up your I/O subsystem?

[/ QUOTE ]

Just did, http://www.maxtoronetouchiii.com/ot3_turbo.html

I feel like my internet penis just grew four inches. Six hundred gigs of raid 0 madness!! MUAUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Eric Chadwick

Wow, $550. They better be damn good tuts.

sledgy

Not to rain on your penis parade (that's a killer drive btw I have an eval unit sitting here) but the issue won't be solved if the drive is external or internal - it's the PCI bus causing your hiccups. The FWR controller is still on the PCI bus. I think the cheapest most effective solution here is still the DV Cam.

thomasp

yep, drive speed is only a concern if you're recording uncompressed single frames. and in that case you better not have apps run alongside the video capture tool anyway.

btw. be careful with striped filesystems, back em up regularly or in the case that one of your raid 0 disks fails, say goodbye to all the data.