Taping the meetings.

[jabr at blu.org (John Abreau)]

kgleason at ma.ultranet.com writes:

> JABR,
> 
> Can you tell me about how the meeting/taping process is going? Our town
> administrator asked me about your process...how large are the files/hour,
> what equipment are you using, etc.? Can you tell us? THanks.
> 
> Kevin

For the most part I'm planning to use the tapes to test the Linux video
editing tools, and so far they're still not ready for prime time. Kino
seems to be the best so far, and it's still got a ways to go.

Kino imports the DV streams fairly well, but with occasional glitches and
dropped frames that are enough to ruin the video for me. I suspect it's 
because I'm importing onto an IDE drive; I now have the ide-scsi bridge, 
so once I can budget for a new hard drive for it I'll be able to test this 
hunch. As for exporting, Kino fails completely.

Rendering to MPEG afterward takes about six hours per hour of video
on my Linux workstation; it would be faster to export back to tape 
and render on my Terapin VCD recorder, if exporting worked.

For the two videos I've completed, I imported them into iMovie on an
Apple iMac running MacOSX. On my iMac, rendering takes even longer;
instead of six hours per hour of video, it's more like 22 hours.
It also takes a similar amount of time to render a smaller Quicktime
file. In practice, I render the MPEG files by exporting the edited
movie back to the camcorder and then playing it out the camcorder's
analog video/audio ports into the VCD recorder, then using vcdxrip
on Linux to extract the MPEG stream from the CD. 

One annoyance with the VCD recorder is it always messes up the first 
video track such that other vcd players or readers skip over it, so 
I always have to record a dummy track before the "real" recording. 
The recorder also takes a while to respond to the remote, so the 
shortest I've been able to make the dummy track is seven seconds.

At present, I'd say the low-cost solution is to get the newest iMac
(800 MHz G4 with the DVD-R burner) and max out the RAM, then use
iMovie which is bundled with the system.

As for file sizes, MPEG files from the VCD recorder are roughly
630 MB per hour, and the Quicktime files are about 80 MB per hour.


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
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"The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."


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