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.
|