[sdiy] Voyager waveform animation

[Richard Wentk]

At 11:16 08/08/2003 -0700, Tim Ressel wrote:
>Yo,
>
>Here's a question for all the tech-heads out there:
>How can I capture NTSB video on my computer (windows)
>and make an MP3 out out it? With sound of course. I'm
>thinking scope camera like John sed.

You can't make an MP3 out of video, because it's not a video format.

The most common video formats are MPEG1, MPEG2, and occasionally MJPEG. If 
you have a MiniDV camera you can also record DV format AVI, but that's too 
chunky for online distribution. There are also RealVideo and WMA, which are 
low quality but very good for online distribution.

The easiest way to capture video is (surprise...) to buy a video capture 
card. If your scope camera has an s-video or composite video connector and 
produces the NTSC format, it's just a case of plug-in and go. Pinnacle, 
Hauppage and assorted others all make video capture hardware. In increasing 
order of cost you can get:

A PCI capture card (perhaps with a TV tuner built-in, so you can read 
Teletext and record your fave shows to hard disk)
USB capture (no tuner)
A PCI card with built-in real-time MPEG1 or MPEG2 compression (probably 
overkill for what you need)
An external capture box with various video in and out connections
Any or all of the above with suitable editing s/ware.

For s/ware I'd recommend Pinnacle Studio 8 for editing. Cheap capture 
hardware bundled with Studio 8 shouldn't cost more than $100. You'd most 
likely capture your scope sequences first (including sound at the same 
time) then export them as RealVideo .rm files which can be downloaded from 
your site.

If you plan to get more seriously into video, Sonic Foundry's Vegas is a 
good choice. But at around $400 you have to be a *lot* more serious.

Oh yeah. You'll need a fast-ish PC too. Both disk and processor speed 
matter for video. (Much more than they do for audio!) 10MB/s and a 1GHz 
anything would be a likely bare minimum, but the faster everything goes the 
easier your life gets.

Richard