VideoRecorder

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VideoRecorder

The VideoRecorder is simple, but quite so powerful.

In the following we will try to describe how to configure the application according to what you would like to use the video recording to.

Capture Controls
Depending on if you would like to broadcast the video file over the Internet, burn it to the CD or keep it on a hard drive for later playback, the first you should think through is the ColorSpace on your final work. VideoRecorder lets you set it from simple grey scale to high quality 32 bit coloring. The higher color depth and then quality, the more space will the video require on your hard drive.

Just as important is to define the Capture Size. How or where will you present the video? How many minutes do you plan to record and how much disk space do you have available. These are all questions that you should consider, as writing a raw 640x480 16 bit video requires just over 17 megabytes per second of disk bandwidth. You can't write that much to a typical hard disk.

Some predefined Capture Sizes (screen resolutions) are available from a pop down menu, but you can also define your own by choosing Other... in the bottom of the menu. The Hauppauge! WinTV EXPRESS card for instance, supports capturing up to 1600x1200. With a standard IDE hard drive you can capture 320x240 16-bit video. If you setup a striped disk you can capture 640x480 16-bit video in realtime. With a fast SCSI hard drive you can manage even higher capture sizes, if you then also have a fast enough computer.

With the Photo-JPEG compressor and a Pentium II 350 MHz you can capture 320x240 at 15 frames per second. Things to check: make sure you have the color space set to a reasonable value: 15, 16 or 32 bit color are good (15 or 16 bit look good and are half the bandwidth of 32-bit). The frame rate can also help to reduce the bandwidth requirements, just as the frame size does.

Writer Setup
You have now finished configuring the capture, and must now define how the application should write the recording to disk.

First out in this part of the setup is the File Name. Give the recording a describing name.

In VideoRecorder you can choose to capture video from your video capture board to two different File Formats: AVI or QuickTime.

Depending of what File Format you chose, you can choose between a handful of different encoders.

Other configurations
From the file menu you can access the video capture hardware's Audio and Video preferences. These settings are the same as the ones in the Media Preferences.

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