Urgent: I have 5 DVM60 tapes that need to go into Director Presentation

[Anim]

Hi all

I have an urgent Director 8.5 Presentation that requires 50 video footage clips (mainly of a character talking head-on to the camera) I have 5 x DVM60 tapes that need scenes cutting from them. The video window in the presentation will be about 320x240.

We have a licence to use DivX codec (hopefully for the best quality and playback)

I need to buy a Mini DV Camcorder so that I can capture this to my PC, I have a Matrox G550 graphics card which has a firewire card.

The "minimum" playback system for the presentation has been stated as a 32MB ram / true colour / Pentium pc with 12X CD rom

My Questions are as follows:

1. Any reccomendations on the mini dv camcorder to buy (this job is probably a one off)

2. Will my firewire card be capable for capture? I've never used it.

3. What software will do the job, I don't need to edit as far as I know, just capture, crop and export as DivX movies.

4. Any other pointers or pitfalls that I might come across in the capture process?

Thanks for any help you can give me as I have to have this job finished by Friday (some late nights I guess)

Thanks
Geoff

PS. My work PC is a 196MB Ram PIII 550 running Windows XP

[bb]

1. I'd recommend a progressive scan capable camcorder (Canon). It's easier to have a progressive source when you want to shoot yourself. The data on your five tapes is likely to be interlaced, because most camcorders don't support progressive scan.

2. There should be no problem with your firewire. You need a capture program - maybe you got some soft bundled with your firewire card. Else watch out for EditStudio, which has a free capture program.

3. See 2. + VirtualDub + DivX codec. Maybe lame 3.91, if you need audio.

4. You want to have it finished until Friday, and this is the first time you work with this stuff? Good luck!
Use Donald Graft's smart deinterlace filter, if you need it. Be aware of the fact that there are two different kinds of DV AVI: DV type-1 and DV type-2. If you need to work with type-1, extract your audio seperately, and frameserve the video through AviSynth. In case of type-2, which contains a duplicated audio stream, you should be able to use it directly in VirtualDub.

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[Anim]

Hi

Thanks for the great info. We have managed to get most of it working but have found some problems.

1. The DivX Video plays back fine streaming from CD-ROM on our "min spec" test machine. As soon as we add the video into a Director 8.5 Presentation and then play it back the audio will go out of sync with the video if anything else happens on screen (like a disolve on a bitmap, sliding text etc..) The audio is part of the avi so how this happens is a mystery to me.

2. What is the best divx encode settings for a 12 X CD Rom drive to stream this presentation on a low end PC, even a laptop?

Either our min spec is wrong or there is some magical settings we can change to keep the video and audio in sync.

Thanks
Geoff (the slightly stressed)

[bb]

1. Sorry, don't know anything about Director 8.5. You may have to remux the audio. Or use uncompressed PCM during editing. What audio settings did you use? MP3? If yes, VBR, or CBR?

2. The CD-ROM is not the problem (make sure DMA is enabled). Your processor should be fast enough, and on a laptop the graphics card can be a problem (shared memory shit, etc.). Some issues have been reported about problems with DivX4 on certain laptops. Try to play your DivX in BSPlayer; this has a very low CPU usage (good for weak machines), and it's got some other nice features...

bb