Please Advise On Editing Before I Destroy My New Video Camera, Housing And Pc!

[Groundhog246]

I'd start with the firewire card. Mine (internal card for a desktop PC) did not come with the cable, but the cable is standard, so any firewire cable should work (fit the card and the camera). If you start with a low quality download, your finished product will inevitably be low end. A PCMCIA card and cable should be fairly cheap to ship, compared to an external DVD.

 

[ronrosa]

Guys,

I can only assume that there must be another way of adjusting the focus once it has been turned to manual, or there would not be a "focus" button on the housing in the first place. Do you know how to do it?

Finally (i promise!) Does anyone know where to buy cheap external DVD burners and firewire ports over the internet which would deliver to Cayman? Also, how do you know if the leads that come witht he goodies would fit into your camcorder and PC?

Cheers - Bob

I believe w/ your housing you can't manual adjust focus. You can switch between manual and auto mode. This would be useful if you were shooting macro with the Gates multiport (wet switchable) lens. You preset the manual focus with the macro lens before the dive. Then switch between auto and manual as you switch between regular lens and macro.

External DVD burners go for around $120. Firewire card for notebooks around $30. Firewire cable $10. I'm sure one of the big companies would ship to Grand Cayman. Take a look at CDW or CompUsa.

The connectors are standard. Firewire connection to the camcorder is 4 pin, to PC is 6 pin. The notebook firewire card uses the standard notebook PCMCIA slot. Just make sure firewire card is for notebooks and not for a PC which uses a PCI slot.

 

[B.Goodwill]

Thanks again everyone for your help, i think i am just going to have to shell out for a DVD burner and firewire card and cable. From your cost estimates Ron, it would appear alot cheaper to ship the hardware in from the US, i am being quoted $256 US to buy a DVD burner "on island."

With regards to buying a desktop computer reather than using a laptop i'm sure your right, if you can convince my partner and the bank manager to go for it i would also be happy to!

Cheers - Bob

 

[diversteve]

Guys,

Thanks for all your help, so from what you are saying it sounds like i need to buy :

1 : An external DVD burner.
2 : A firewire port.

Do you think if i buy the DVD burner, it will make any difference in terms of quality if i do not go ahead with the firewire port? If i have to get it i will, however i "broke the bank" buying the camera and housing, and kind of thought after that expense that would be the end of it! Obviousley not, as i also need to buy some of those Nightrider lights at some stage (minimum purchase $900!)

Finally (i promise!) Does anyone know where to buy cheap external DVD burners and firewire ports over the internet which would deliver to Cayman? Also, how do you know if the leads that come witht he goodies would fit into your camcorder and PC?

Cheers - Bob

Bob,

What Ronrosa said...

It's difficult to say if you need the firewire card. I just read this in a review about your camera: "Those of you running Windows can use USB, in addition to FireWire, to download video to your computer. Sony calls this feature USB Streaming." If you can get a clean capture via USB 2.0 then I'd say you don't, but I think firewire will still yield better capture quality.

The DVD burner will let you burn clean output to a DVD for viewing. So you need it.

In addition to CompUSA, B&H - www.bhphotovideo sells everything you need and ships internationally. Not the best prices I've ever seen. CDW ships international but payment is only via wire transfer or check on a US bank. I know this as I know someone in the far east who buys here regularly.

It's possible your camera came with a firewire cable, they're very similar looking to a USB 2.0 cable. A 6pin firewire cable will give you software camera control during editing.

I don't think I'd ever buy lights if I lived in Cayman. Unless you want to film going through Big Tunnels or deep off the wall. There's so much surface light there that I'm sure with a red filter you could easily film down to 80' or more. Can you do manual white balance with the Gates housing? I've seen video somewhere (maybe Ronrosa's?) shot at 80' w/o lights with white balance adjusted at depth, it looked great.

steve

P.S. It seems to me like that dive store just past Treasure Island on the right (going towards GT) might have some of this. If I remember right, they had some video gear and accessories. That's the best divestore I've ever been in my entire life.

 

[Groundhog246]

I just checked the outside of the box. My (PCI) firewire card came with a cable. If you're buying a PCMCIA firwire card, I'd look for on ewith more than one port (most seem to have 2). That would let you run a dvd burner via firewire (faster than USB 2.0) or plug in a big external hard drive when you run out of space.
My card also came with a copy of Ulead VideoStudio 6

 

[ChrisA]

[Many good replies here. To sum them up...

1) Your camera records a very high quality image to tape and if playing back from tape the image will be high quality.

2) THat high quality image you have on tape is about 200MB per minute. A one hour DV tape holds about 200 x 60 = 12,000MB of data. That 12 gigabytes!!!

3) When ever you comperess video of couse it gets smaller but it is net for "free" you have to throw something away. Good compression methods throw aways "stuff" the eye tends not to notice. A lot of human factor reserch went into these compression methods but physics is physics and you WILL lose detail nd quality the more the image is compressed.

4) for best results, to get the image quality you paid for you want to download the image using a firewire cable to a DV format file. That means you make an EXACT copy of the tape on your hard disk. Yes it will be _really_ big. Yes big but ZERO loss of quality from the tape.

5) Do ALL your editing and post production work in the DV format. You will need a powerfull computer to make this go fast. You will also need enough disk space to hold all the video, maybe from many DV tapes and your edited results and saved backups and so on. After editing, you will have a large DV format file. Then if you want to make a DVD, VCD or even a web-format dwnloadable movie you will use software to convert (compress) the DV file down to a size that will fit on your media.

You smaller the media the more compression will be required and the lower the quality of the result. But your edited "master" is in DV format and from that master you can make any video format you want from DV qualty on down. Even a DVD will require compression from the DV format. A CD can hold up to 800MB compressing a one one DV tape to 800MB keeps only 1/15th of the information on the tape. 14/15ths is lost. A two layer DVD can hold up to 8GB iand a LOT less compression is required

6) compromises are required if you'd like to edit in DV format but maybe
a) Your software will not let you
b) You don't have enough disk space
c) Your computer is to slow to process 10GB of video data
d) something else....
It's only money. If you have to budget, spend the money on items that will give the most quality for the buck. Identify and adrress the "bottleneck" first.

7) Note that DV video ffiles can be directly copied back to DV tape over the fire wire cable. If the video was _always_ kept in DV format, never converted ad than converted back there is no loss of quality. So you can keep your hard drive "clean" by saving to tape. Once a file is compressed the image quality is gone for good, no way to get it back.

 

[B.Goodwill]

Chris :

Thanks for the tips, can you confirm what "DV," and "DV Format" is? I always assumed DV was a DVD.

My plan would be to download sections of what i record on camera onto my laptop, edit the footage, then burn what has been recorded onto DVD, then delete what was downloaded onto my laptop to save memory space. The movies i would be copying to DVD would probably be at most half an hour long. What i would really like to do is say maybe in a year or two, be able to produce a DVD as a kind of "guide" to some of the better dive sites on Grand Cayman. Not for commercial gain (i am new to this so i really don't think anyone would be interested in paying for my footage!)

I am visiting the States in Jan and will try and pick up a DVD burner and firewire cable.

 

[ChrisA]

There is only one "DV format" all cameras record it the same way. It uses 5 to 1
compression and samples the color space half as frequently as the black and
white part of the signal.

The DVD "Standard" alows for many options so the maker of the DVD can trade off
image quality for how long a DVD will play. DVD's can be single laayer and hold
only about 4GB or data or double layer and hold about 9GB. Commercial DVD you
buy from the Hollywood studios will be double layer. Some newer home DVD burners
can do double layer but most can't.

The video data on a DVD can be encoded using either MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 but mostly
MPEG-2 is used. MPEG-2 itself can be "tweeked" with many parameters. DVD players
will read information from the DVD as to how it was encoded and use that info to
re-create the video signal from

Your software may or may not allow you to turn MPEG-2's "knobs".

If you do a bit of math you can comfirm that DV can't equal DVD. DVD's simply are
not big enough. The ecoding method is different too. in DV each frame is compressed independdently while MPEG-2 will one frame as a full image and then the following "n" frames will be differences from the previous refference frame. "n" is allowed to vary between
like 4 and 16 (or so) This allows MPEG to do very good compression because in video frames tend to look like adjacent frames, but with only small difference

While both may encode 720x480 at 30fps the way they store the data is different and
nether actually stores _all_ the pixels.


For best quality. Keep everything in DV format. You can edit on the PC and then
record the edited movie back to DV tape if you need to reclaim the space on the disk.

ALSO, and this is the good part. You can record computer files to a DVD. you can
always simply save the DV format files to a DVD as a backup.

ONe thing some people do is to import the DV tape to the PC then do a "first cut" or more like "culling" then "cutting" simply remove the garbage which for most people 75%. Then they record this back to a clean DV tape over firewire. These are called "master tapes" and you used these for making the final video.

Chris :

Thanks for the tips, can you confirm what "DV," and "DV Format" is? I always assumed DV was a DVD.

My plan would be to download sections of what i record on camera onto my laptop, edit the footage, then burn what has been recorded onto DVD, then delete what was downloaded onto my laptop to save memory space. The movies i would be copying to DVD would probably be at most half an hour long. What i would really like to do is say maybe in a year or two, be able to produce a DVD as a kind of "guide" to some of the better dive sites on Grand Cayman. Not for commercial gain (i am new to this so i really don't think anyone would be interested in paying for my footage!)

I am visiting the States in Jan and will try and pick up a DVD burner and firewire cable.

 

[B.Goodwill]

Thanks for the info, i think i understand 30% of it, its all just rather too complicated!

 

[Groundhog246]

Great summary ChrisA. Not all compression formats lose info, but the more you want (or need) to compress a file, the more likely you'll need to move to a compression scheme that does.
I like your idea of recording back to DV tape to free up HD space. I hadn't thought of that (I knew I could, just never thought of it as a way to store an edited file with max quality). That'll help me out with a current project (so did the larger HD, but my current system maxes out at 126G of the HD recognized. New system next year)