clips from old home movies

[studiocarter]

Sometimes, old home movies show their age. That is, things and places were filmed that speak of the date they were filmed. Old cars, steam locomotives, biplanes, structures that are now gone, store fronts that display prices of goods, factories, city streets and so on show their age.
Unfortunately, such film clips are few and far between.

Between are babies, relatives, Xmas trees, parties, water or snow skiing, dinner tables and they all could have been shot today or yesterday and no one could say if they were 50 years old or not.

Do you have any such old home movie films? I do. And, I have collected such old looking clips.

My question is, if a producer wanted to use such clips in a TV video, what format would it need be in to transfer other than RANK, that is. I mean, an affordable production using consumer video cameras and Premiere.

My capture card is a miroVIDEO DC30 plus and most folks don't have the codec to play the captures or use them in Premiere. It is analog. The camera is Hi-8. Files may be 640 x 480, 608 x 456, or 702 x 480. One 50 foot reel of film will fit onto one CD in the miro capture codec.

What codec would YOU need the capture file to be in in order to use it on your computer? Cine Pac? Indeo Video? Indeo is my choice because it encodes fast.

Michael

[mattias]

mjpeg (miro, avid, matrox and others) and dv25 (mini dv/dvcam) are your best bets. both encode super fast and can be used on virtually all systems.

/matt

[studiocarter]

ftp://ftp.filmshooting.com/upload/miroVIDEO DC30 plus M-JPEG[16].avi

can you play this file?

hurry and put up your mjpeg file so I can see if my computer/video card will play it.

[studiocarter]

ftp://ftp.filmshooting.com/upload/miroVIDEO DC30 plus M-JPEG[16].avi


copy and paste the entire file name.

[studiocarter]

hence forth I may be found at

http://www.16mmoviemaking.com


my film clips will be only hinted at there, but available on CD disks or tape


Michael

[mattias]

avi's don't play well on macs, so i couldn't really test it. i know for a fact that the dc30 uses "standard" mjpeg encoding though, since i had one myself, and after it gave up a few years ago i could still use the captured files after installing a software mjpeg codec. there are a few that are actually free i believe. i haven't used windows computers for three years or so... ;-)

can you capture as quicktime with the card? i seem to remember adobe premiere being able to do that. it should work on macs, since quicktime has had mjpeg built in since 1992 or something...

/matt

[studiocarter]

Yes, Premiere will work in Quick Time mode; it will edit and export as .mov files. It will NOT connect to the capture card while in Quick Time editing mode.

I would like to see files, capture files, able to be edited on different machines.

Larger digital files would need to be resized since my card works best at 640 x 480. It may be pushed to also do 702 x 480, but that is tricky.

Michael

[mattias]

so, premiere on windows can use quicktime, and macs can't use avi's. that settles the file format i guess. :-) as for codec, i think dv would be the most compatible, even though it doesn't support your frame size and has a non variable bit rate. the main reason to go with dv would be that most people use dv for editing, which means they wouldn't have to render.

but, mjpeg *is* the industry standard for video editing, so it really *should* work. i tried changing the file format of your avi to mov with a utility that changes the format without changing the data, but quicktime didn't accept it as mjpeg anyway for some reason. i'll look into it further...

/matt

[jessh]

but, mjpeg *is* the industry standard for video editing, so it really *should* work.
/matt

you are right that mjpeg is the industry standard for video that origionated from analog sources, but adobe seems to have forgoten that, I currently use a Hi-8 video camera for video and have a video capture card with hardware MJPEG compression, and use adobe premiere for editing. The problem is adobe premiere is to focused on dv and way to bugy, it requires a third party mjpeg codec, and so far I have not found one that premiere doesnt crash while trying to use, and it is not just the codecs fault, they work perfectly fine with virtual dub, which I currently use to convert the mjpeg clips to dv, and then when I am done I have to convert them back to mjpeg to ouput, which means a lot of quality loss. So far I have only played with avi mjpeg in premiere, it may work better with qt, and I hope it does, because it shouldnt be hard for me to get setup to capture into qt files, just havent gotten around to it yet. btw I currently use linux and lavtools to do video capture.

~Jess

[S8 Booster]

jessh, just a detail.

Have been working with older AP versions on the MACs so I am not really into your setup but just a question: If you use a M-JPEG capture card, shouldn´t your video capture settings in the AP be set to "no compression" because the capture card processor already applied that codec to the file?

Doing it twice cause the crashes? or at least severe quality losses.

That is if you use the Premiere to capture the video clips.

Or do you use a dedicated software for capturing video from that card?

I use to capture video at no compression = (almost) no loss, then edit and apply compressing when I process the final movie. This is usually preferable when I work analog/digital capture->DV->analog to reduce quality losses.

For big films / files it requires racks and stacks of RAID disks though.

[mattias]

it should probably say "miro hardware mjpeg codec" or similar, since the driver for the card includes an avi codec that uses the card for playback, even on the screen. it works just fine in premiere 5. i've edited several hours of footage that way...

/matt

[jessh]

If you use a M-JPEG capture card, shouldn´t your video capture settings in the AP be set to "no compression" because the capture card processor already applied that codec to the file?
</quote>
the problem is that my card has been discontinued by the manufacturer (iomega) and there arent drivers that work with it in win2k, and I never had much luck with it in windows anyways. I do my video capture in linux with a dedicated program which works great, and then I use a software codec in windows to access the files, but for some premiere doesnt like any of the codecs and either crashes or refuses to show the video with all of them I have tried. btw I am using premiere 6.0

I use to capture video at no compression = (almost) no loss, then edit and apply compressing when I process the final movie. This is usually preferable when I work analog/digital capture->DV->analog to reduce quality losses.

For big films / files it requires racks and stacks of RAID disks though.

doing no compression at full resolution and frame rate requires a lot faster disk than ive got, and I dont have the money for a raid at the moment.

~Jess