Scrubba

Main Menu

Installation

System

Preferences

Applications

Demos

Development

Advanced

Related Applications
Media Preferences VideoRecorder

Info
If you can handle multiple cables at once, why not try this? Capture your live TV or analog source, by plugin your TV or VCR into your DV camera, set the DV camera to do the encoding, and pass the frames along to Scrubba through the 1394 port.

Scrubba

Zeta comes a selection of video capturing softwares, one of the is Scrubba.

The application begins capturing video immediately as it starts up and will therefore quickly be able to fill up a small disk partition.

From the File menu you can pause the capturing, and you can change the size of the ring buffer and its file name under the Options menu. The video input source is configured from the Media Preferences in Zeta, and can eighter be set to DV (IEEE-1394 or raw video (bt848).

Scrubba handles the streams as is, and does not encode frames before they are to written to its ring buffer. It is therefore important that your raw setting doesn't exceed your fisk throughput. As mentioned in the article about the VideoRecorder, this usually means resolutions no more than 352x240 at 16 bits per pixel. When it comes to capturing DV Scrubba is capable of handling resolutions up to 720x480 in realtime. This is because the DV format has a lower data rate then 320x240 raw video.

If you have DV and you want to capture live TV or an analog source, you can plug a VCR into your camera, have it do the encoding, and pass the frames along to Scrubba through via 1394.

Scrubba can present the video in two different ways. The online playback is displaying the live video frames as they are being captured. If you choose to press the Pause button, only the playback will be paused, not the recordings. The second time you press the Pause button Scubba will perform a timelapse playback beginning from where you earlier paused the playback of the video recording. You can also press the Live button here, that will bring the playback in sync (realtime) with what is being captured.

Scrubba has two sliders:

1. The first tracks the location of the capture head in the ring bugger and is not interactive.
2. The second slider tracks and controls the location of the playback head.

When the playback head is paused, you can scrub by dragging Scrubba's sliders (here is what got it's name from). When the playback slider has the focus, use the left and right arrow keys to get frame accurate scrubbing.

You can also export frames from a video in Scrubba. This is done simply by scrubbing to the frame you want to take and then pressing the Grab button.You can of course also export parts of the video as a movie clip. To do this, simply hold down the shift key as you scrub over a series of frames before you click the Grab button.

Images and movies are named sequentially; GRAB0001.jpg, GRAB0002.mov, GRAB0003.png, and so on.

The export file formats can be changed using the Still and Clip submenus under the Options menu. But when you are capturing DV clips, Scrubba will not re-encode the frames from your camera (stills, of course, always get re-encoded). Instead, it will feed them into the movie as-is. This way your clips retain the audio. When grabbing clips from a raw video source, be aware, some encoders are slow and your clip may be overtaken by the capture head before it completes.

©2003-2004 by yellowTAB GmbH