[Sigia-l] Help with video-taping tests

[Listera]

"James Muntone" wrote:

> However, I know next to nothing about digital video. If I were to drag an hour
> of video off a digital movie camera and dump it into editing software (say
> Premiere), would I still have to render it to have it be usable?

Ah, VHS, 8-track cartridges, Sputnik... :-)

DV is what you're looking for. A DV cam can directly record to your hard
disk, no 'rendering' is involved. That file then becomes your source for
direct editing in a DV-aware editing app. It sounds like you're on Windows.
(On a Mac iSight+iMovie is made for this kind of stuff.) On Win, Premier 5.1
and up supports DV. With QuickTime installed, you don't even need a DV card,
as Premier will read .dv files.

> And what kind of file sizes would I be talking? How do you store this stuff in
> some work-able format?

Depends.

File size = Length x Data rate

DV-NTSC compressed digital video files are @ 3.6MB/sec, 210MB/min or
13GB/hour with a frame size of 720x480. That sounds pretty hefty. But if you
don't mind looking less sexy than you really are, you can reduce frame size
to 320x240 or frame rate to 15/20 or apply compression, all to reduce file
size pretty dramatically.

For example, you can stuff 35 mins of a digital video on a 640 MB CD-ROM at
300Kb/sec, which is pretty good quality compression. At 100Kb/sec (more
compressed/lower quality) you could store over 100 mins of video (320x240@
15 fps). It all depends on how you want to save and distribute your final
movie.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba