Sunday, January 19, 2003

Video Editing

Rebuilt my game machine again today... (well, just changed video cards and removed some obsolete items - didn't reinstall the O/S) ... I've reinstalled my ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 32Mb AGP video card. I want to get back into video editing again now that I have a faster system (I originally tried this on a 350Mhz Pentium2). I'll have to find my notes, because the old P2 just wasn't fast enough to capture 640x480 video. I'm also mucking with the various formats that the capture card software (ATI's) can save files to. System specs are as follows:

Athlon XP 1800+
512Mb PC2100 DDR RAM (CL3? probably...)
Asus A7V266E motherboard
Promise FastTrak100 PCI RAID card
(2) 75Gb IBM 7200rpm Deskstar drives
ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 32Mb AGP video card
pair of USBv2 external 40Gb HDs
Toshiba SVHS 6-head VCR, S-Video in/out
19" TV (to be replaced with a 14" Toshiba)

The first trick is to find a setting where the PC doesn't drop frames left and right during the initial capture. At the moment, that seems to be around 6Mbps on the 640x480 capture size (both MPEG1 and MPEG2 like to start dropping frames at anything over 6Mbps). Strange thing is that the CPU is only at 80 percent utilization when this happens - which means that I've got a bottleneck somewhere other then the CPU. The other interesting thing is that ATI's MPEG2 format seems to be either proprietary or just something that Windows Media Player can't make heads or tails of.

Now if I could just find my editing notes from almost 2 years ago... I figure they're on one of my servers, but I'm not finding them with a quick look around. That's what happens when I rebuild my servers about once a year, files end up a bit out of sorts.

(chuckle) They don't even make that VCR anymore. Neither Sony or Toshiba make Super VHS ET VCRs anymore, JVC still does though. (Super VHS records at 400-lines.) Now, that's not a real big deal to me since digital is coming around the corner - I'm mostly working on moving stuff off of video tape and into digital format (which is my next trick).

Hmmm... no hits on searching for my notes from 2 years back yet and I've searched both of my servers where stuff usually gets dumped. Next possibility is on the laptop (those 3 searches are still running...) or maybe I dumped it off onto a CD or my search criteria is wrong. Time to go look in SuperCat (a listing of the files on my "archive" CDs). Maybe broaden my search criteria as well.

Looking at the files on my test CD from November 2000, when I made a bunch of captures at various resolutions and bitrates, it looks like I have my answer on what my old system was capable of. All of the captures are MPEG1, resolution seems to always be 320x240 or 352x240 (guess the old system wasn't able to capture 640x480), and bit-rates are 3 to 4 Mbps. There is one 640x480 capture, but it's at 1.5 Mbps.

posted by Wuphon's at 9:22 PM