| Making Your Own Videos |
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We often hear from members who what to make videos to analyze or to send to us for analysis. Here is what you will need. First, obviously you need a camera. You can get one for as little as $400.00 that will output what is called "composite video". Composite video uses the three "banana" plugs, yellow, white, red, illustrated below, top, left. We have made videos with this system and they are adequate.
Most cameras have a variety of output methods. The most common are shown in the table above. If you are able to use the USB connector, there is probably a port on the back of your computer. If you are looking for the best video, then S-Video will be your choice. However, this will require a special capture board that may cost $350.00. We use a board by Winnov. The most common connector on cameras today is called the IEEE Firewire. It is cheep, and a capture board only cost $30.00. But you will need video capture software so that your computer can capture the video that goes from your camera down the connector to your computer card an onto your disk. Many people use ArcSoft which cost about $99.00. Adobe Premier is a common editor which costs $500.00 or more and is not worth the money in our opinion. The highest quality video is made by capturing to an AVI file. This allows you the most versatility in editing. If your software will save your video to an AVI file, then you can use a freeware product called VirtualDub. This will allow you to edit and deinterlace your video. Deinterlacing is very useful for producing clear videos that work on a computer and VirtualDub does it. But if you shoot your videos with a shutter speed of 1/250 sec or faster, deinterlacing may not be necessary. Virtualdub allows you to crop the videos in the editor where you can see what the cropping will do to each frame. It provides brightness and contrast controls as well as sharpening and other features--all for free. Once you have edited your video save them as avi files so that you can open them with Quicktime Pro ($29.95) and make Quicktime movies that are small and compact. Here are our Quicktime settings:
If you are interesting in sending us your video, Quicktime is a good form to send it in. Keep the file below 5 megabytes. Quicktime Pro is an editor which can do a lot of useful things in addition to compressing your video and shrinking its size to make it small. You can make very good videos from the cheep parts we have described above. The only expensive parts are the camera, and perhaps the capture board depending on your objectives. If you have problems getting your video made, perhaps we can help. Write or call.
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