Richard Sanchez
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And while I won’t further the on going argument further than this post, saying “it isn’t prone to freezing up with errors, sudden unexpected quits” really could not be further from the truth. Let’s be fair and accurate. Both programs have pros and cons, and I seen both crash for a multitude of a reasons. I’m done and won’t argue any farther.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA -
I recently bought a Sima Universal LED camera light (SL-10L) from best buy for $30. It’s not the best thing you could use, I sometimes have to use tracing paper to diffuse the light, but for what you’ll pay for it, it’s totally worth it. It uses an internal rechargable battery, which is nice since it doesn’t draw power away from your camera battery. As for Lavs, I don’t have a recommendation for a cheap wireless but I got one from Circuit City by Audio Technica, model number ATR35s. It cost me about $30, and it connects via mini plug (which is nice in case you don’t have the XLR adapter), and it is a condeser mic powered by an LR44 button battery. The sound quality is very nice, and comes with a 20ft cable.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA -
You Tube videos work better at 29.97 fps, so I’d recommend saving your video as a 29.97 video with a 2:3 pulldown. You Tube also has a 10 minute time limit, so you may need to breakup your video. I find in general, I limit my video data rate to either 768, or if the filesize is still too large, down to 512 kbs, and audio at 128 kbs. Also, I typically set the keyframing to auto, if your keyframes are too frequent (as you have at one per second) you tend to get a strobing effect of clean vs blocky. Definitely set your encode to multipass.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA -
You will typically see that flutter in the auto focus in low light situations, it’s because as the camera finds a point of focus and loses it, it’s constantly refocusing. To be honest, manual focus will be your best bet prevent this from happening, but aside from that, good lighting will help keep that to a minimum. If you don’t have control over the lighting, I would suggest keeping to manual focus. A lanc controller would help you adjust focus, though I usually just keep my thumb on the focus ring.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA -
I’ve found with You Tube, that it’s not neccessarily that you want to have the largest filesize possible, but that you want to follow their specs of 320×240 and 29.97 fps. They do recompress their videos anyway, but as long as you stick to those specs and use a good mpeg 4 codec, like h.264, or I frequently use the Sorenson AVC codecs, you’ll get good results. Check out Current TV for a spec sheet, I’m sure they’ll have a set of specs to get optimum results. Every server will be different and have different bandwidth requirements.
To answer about is there a point to where bitrate won’t affect the video quality, yes there usually is a point to where higher bitrate doesn’t neccessarily result in any cleaner video, but that point will depend on the codec. I find with h.264 at 320×240 there’s rarely a need to go much higher than 768 kbs. Sometimes with very high motion video I’ll go up to 1200 kbs, I always spit out my first encode at 768 to get a good frame of reference.
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I’ve run into issues with that too, generally with XL1 and XL2 cameras. I found that if I digitized using a cheap Canon camcorder, it worked fine. I used a ZR65 and ZR40, both of which worked fine and you can find on craigslist or even brand new very cheap.
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Are you using a LANC controller? At my previous job, we were using a LANC controller on a DVX that was malfunctioning and causing the camera to zoom on it’s own. Otherwise, it sounds like a malfunctioning servo.
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Field order absolutely matters when compressing for DVD. On your computer it might look fine, but once you watch it on an interlaced monitor, it will have a fluttering effect. Though I don’t use procoder, that’s such a simple and important feature, it’s got to be there somewhere. They may have just moved that tool, check the help files. In a worst case scenario, you could deinterlace your video. You would be losing resolution, but the field issue would be gone.
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I’ve seen hi-8 cameras with an s-video out, but not all of them have one. Simply put, without timebase correction, if you run your vhs directly in to a capture card, you will likely encounter strange colors, warping, color bleeding and other ugly anomalies. Here’s a good article on timebase correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timebase_corrector For a Final Cut system, I really like the Decklink capture cards.
As far as simplicity goes though, it would be easiest to just dub them straight over to mini dv. I absolutely admit it won’t be the best method to retain the maximum quality, but as far as ratio of ease to quality, and expense to quality, it would be the method that I would choose, especially if it’s not going out to broadcast.
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Yeah, it’s a composite cable and while it it’s not the greatest option since the color separation isn’t great. If you have an s-video out from your camera, you can use that to go directly to the computer, but that would require a timebase corrector. Likewise, if you have a mini DV deck, you can take that s-video signal directly in, which is superior to the composite signal.