[thelist] Video Capture/Hardware/Software

[Kelly Hallman]

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Head Dragon wrote:
> Remember Dedicated hardware on the new Macs and even on my older one.
> When I trained people we used the Radius Video system that had...

Okay, so you are talking about adding custom video hardware.  In your
original post it seemed to me that you were saying the Mac, out of box,
has the necessary custom hardware to do what you are talking about.

At that point, I fail to see what difference the base platform has to do
with it.  There is a large array of professional custom hardware solutions
that are PC-based as well.

I believe your credentials are in order, and I'm not suggesting that these
high-end specs are false.  I am saying that doing decent quality video is
more than possible with a middle-end PC *or* Mac, with no custom hardware.
Sure, you can't do realtime rendering of effects or edit the next Star
Wars sequel, but...

> Again compression, dedicated hardware compression is how you get away
> with it.  Do you burn full frame 30 minute DVDs?

Well, compression is compression.  Some compression is better than others.
If you have hardware compression you're in much better shape (and probably
get there a lot more quickly), but it's certainly not required to work
with digital video.

As for DVDs, what am I missing?  If I have 29 frames/sec DV video at
720x480 and I build an image of the DVD (which is obviously less than
4.7gb) what is keeping me from burning that image on a DVD burner?

> If I was to use a PC Video card that had input from the old days
> compression and only able to get one frame per second.. ..Which by the
> way is how most PC cards do it that I have had.

Well dude, this is 2002.. I'm talking about DV and Firewire, which is
pretty much identical between the PC and the Mac and certainly more than
enough for most people's needs.  It doesn't solve the problem of
"capturing" high quality video from a video feed, but I could certainly
record an input source onto my DV camcorder and capture that.

When you get right down to it, if you've got a good DV cam, the quality is
roughly on the line with DVD quality.  Then you transcode to MPEG-2 and
burn your DVD.  I know how custom hardware helps, I just don't see why you
think it's the only way to do it.

I'm not trying to be argumentative (and I appologize if this has strayed a
bit off topic) but man, I'm doing what you seem to be saying is not
possible.  And this is like a $500 PC w/ a Firewire card...

--
Kelly Hallman
http://wrack.org/