Digital Video Recording, External Solution
polycounter lvl 19
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-)
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-)
Replies
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.
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.
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
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.
If I make some recordings with a DVcam and it goes awfully, I'll be returning it for a refund and try something else.
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
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?
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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
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.