How to capture & compress for upload

Spirit wrote on 10/23/2002, 3:02 AM

This is an odd question, so please bear with my explanation :)

I'm going to be editing some video for a corporation located about 1000km from me. They will take the footage using their in-house digital camera. They also have an ftp site which I can access. The problem is: what's the easiest way for them to get the digital video into a format small enough for me to download off their site? The pieces will only be about six or seven minutes long, but that could still add up to a hefty hit on my broadband connection... The edited pieces will go on line as 320x240 15fps so they quality doesn't have to be too high.

They have a Firewire card in a couple of their PCs, but no video software. This is an experiment for them too so they don't want to spend too much money intially installing other software - especially since they don't have anyone skilled in this area (which is why I'll be editing the footage).

I suppose what I'm looking for is some cheap software that will capture through the Firewire card, and compress it to something reasonable. And it must be simple !

I hope this question isn't too ridiculous, but I've never come across this problem before.

thanks for any ideas

S

Comments

kkolbo wrote on 10/23/2002, 5:42 AM

The smallest they can go is to 320x240 at 15fps. The problem is two fold. One, if they compress it hard to get it to you, the quality in the end after you edit it and then recompress it is going to be rough at best. Also, unless they send it as a DV file which is very large it will be hard to edit because VV has to decompress it as it goes. All that said, here is one way.

If they have Windows XP and a Firwire card, they can go to Movie Maker that comes with XP. Use it to transfer from the camera. They can then save it using one of the high rate templates in Movie Maker. It will arrive to you as a .WMV file.

K

Chienworks wrote on 10/23/2002, 8:00 AM

WMV is probably a good choice. Go for the 3Mb/s template and you'll get a pretty good compressed version. The one thing i've noticed with WMV though is that it tends to desaturate the colors a lot, so you'll get a version that is slightly black&white compared to the original. You can correct for this somewhat when you edit. You'll be looking at about 24MB/minute though, so the files will still be rather large.

Just a curious question ... is having them send you the original DV tapes out of the question? They could probably ship them overnight for not too much money and you might have them on your desk faster than you could download the files. That would also save them all the time and effort of doing the capturing and compressing.

Spirit wrote on 10/23/2002, 8:26 AM

I never even knew there was a moviemaker app in XP ! Just too used to VV3 I guess. That looks like an excellent low-cost method.

And yes, perhaps sending the tapes via overnight courier is even better. I always like the simple way.

thanks