[thelist] Video Capture/Hardware/Software

[Head Dragon:)]

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 a
seperate interface card for the computer that did massive
compression. It had a head end for Video input that was tied to the
interface card.  The raid card had a jump over firewire connector on
it along with one on the interface card.  We recorded direct to a
striping raid with 4 drives on a 40 Meg a second per drive transfer.
That was 4-8gig drives.

At 1:01 PM -0800 11/27/02, Kelly Hallman wrote:
>On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Head Dragon wrote:
>
>  > Well the real problem is (Mac Lover digital Video Trainer at one time)
>>  not the computer but the throughput.  A single frame grab of 640*480
>>  NTSC video is 30 megs and each grab is 2 Frames and there are 60 Frames
>>  a second.
>
>What?!  That's ~900mb/sec by my calculation:
>a four minute capture would be over 200gb!!

Compression Compression Compression that needs to be done with
hardware can get that down to 100M.

>I'd like to see any Mac or PC work with that...
>
>>  Disc space and speed is the limiting factor even with the video cards
>>  compression factor added in.
>
>I have a 40gb and an 80gb hard drive and I could easily work with plenty
>of DV video comfortably.  And this is on a Duron 1.3 ... I have a friend
>that works with lots of video and he's only got a dual 500mhz PC.

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

>  > DVD is good but requires a machine that can handle the raw horsepower
>>  to do the work.  CPU speed is not the only factor.  That video DVD
>>  iMac works because it uses dedicated hardware for that purpose.  You
>>  would be shocked at the number of PCs setting in video studios and TV
>>  studios bought to do video capture to later be scrapped after many
>>  frustrating months.  Then to be replaced either with dedicated
>>  digital editing systems or a Macintosh.
>
>I really don't understand where these facts are coming from.  Sure, your
>needs could exceed a particular PC's abilities, but you can get the same
>bang for your buck with a PC as with a Mac, provided you are willing to
>pay for what you need (goes for either platform, gotta pay to play).  For
>the average home video enthusiast, it doesn't take more than a 1.5ghz
>machine to be golden, even even with fairly ambitious video projects.

I worked in the industry that is where the facts come from.  Cast and
Crew on a Technology TV show in San Diego and I made five commercials
for prime time TV training a digital crew in for an advertising
company.  That TV show was entirely Digitized and stored across a
SANS Raid on fiber channel.  The raid had 90 8 gig drives(biggest
available that week).


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 that meant I
had a 60% compression rate with 50 of that coming from the loss of
the odd or even frame.  Which by the way is how most PC cards do it
that I have had.

>I also have recently acquired a DVD burner and expect no problems burning
>DVDs on my 1.3 machine.  There is definitely a steep learning curve there,
>but I'm also going the "pro" authoring route.  I could burn a DVD today if
>I wanted to use the braindead software they included with the drive.
>Burning a DVD at 1x is about like burning a CD at 18x, right?  Well, I can
>smoothly burn at 24x on my 24x CD burner, so I don't really see why you
>think these things either require a Mac or a pro editing solution...
>
>>  Even with 1 frame per picture(starts becoming grainy) that is 900 for
>>  one second of uncompressed video.

Mistyped 900 should be 15M.

>I guess you also come up with 900mb/second.  Where do you buy your
>multi-terrabyte hard drives?
>


--
Sincerely,
Kid Stevens Webmaster Dragon Vision Design

"Warning,
Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons.
They will make you crunchy and eat you with ketchup."
-Unknown Author