The latest videos, included in the second gallery, were videotaped by me using a Sony CCD-TRV68 Hi8 Camcorder. I chose this model because I like its combination of features and price. It also has an SVIDEO output which allows higher quality sampling.

Later, when I upgraded my computer to 1GHz Athlon, I upgraded to an ATI ALL-IN-WONDER Rage Pro with 32MB of RAM and a 4X AGP interface. This card has a much wider variety of modes and can cpature high quality (8Mbit/s) MPEG in real time! Furthermore, it recognizes my entire 30GB D: drive in MPEG mode, thus allowing for many hours of continuos capture. The video editor incuded with the card is somewhat better but still far too primitive for anything other than just trimming the original captures.

There are, of course, a lot of other video capture options available, but the ATI cards provide an excellent combination of features and price. There are seperate capture cards, some for as little as $50, but since they are seperate from the video card they are limited to using a PCI interface which is shared with the hard drive and usually the video card as well. you just can't expect the same kind of performance from these cards as you can get from those with integrated video cards, especially the ones with an AGP interface.

An interesting quirk of the original MPEGs is that if you view them using the windows media player in full screen mode they wind up being letterboxed and horizontally stretched so that the width/height ratio is about double what it should be. This doesn't happen once they are saved by the video editor, so I suspect that it is a unique "feature" of the ATI multimedia device.

The original 8Mb/s MPEGs are very high quality, but somewhat unwieldy. Not only are they very large, but the amount of processing they require really slows down the operation of the sequencer, and often leads to crashes. For this reason, I use the video editor portion of MainActor to trim these and then save them in full quality Indeo 5 format. The resulting files are only about 50% smaller, but they have the same quality and the sequencer runs about 10 times as fast when working with them, and is remarkably stable. Thus the original MPEGs are used only for the initial capture, and can be discarded once the conversion to AVI format is done.

Once the desired part of the clips has been selected, any needed color correction is done and the titles and transitions have been added, it is then time to do the final rendering. I usually do both AVI and MPEG versions. The AVIs are done in Indeo 5 format, because it seems to have better quality and compression than other formats, at an 85% "quality" setting with 15 FPS. Some of the clips with more "intense" action are done at 30 FPS. MPEGs are usually rendered at 750K bps with some being done at 1.25 Mbps at either 24 or 30 Fps. In both formats the clips are usually rendered at a resolution of 320x240. While 352x240 more accurately represents full frame video, 320x240 is a better fit to the computer screen. While the quality is similar, in my experience the MPEGs will be smaller in clips without sound and the AVIs will be smaller in clips with sound.

Along with the video, several frames will be rendered as JPEGs. One or more of these JPEGs will be selected as "preview" shots for both webpage and newsgroup presentation.