Talking about Digital Imaging (7)——Miscellaneous Talk on Video Recording Products

Introduction

In the last issue, the author introduced the professional video production equipment of the TV broadcasting company and introduced the video product in this issue. Previously video production required expensive equipment and professional knowledge, but now the average family can also have a simple and complete video production system and implement a self-directed, self-directed, smiling, small movie. A basic home video production system requires a high-performance personal computer, a video capture device, a video camera, and a video editing software (for example, if you want to create a VCD, you need an additional CD-ROM drive). Without counting personal computers, the above equipment can already be owned within 10,000 Hong Kong dollars. Nowadays, more and more people have mobile camcorders. Every festival or party always sees people dancing. The demand of the market and the competition among manufacturers have promoted the emergence of many personal video products.

Figure 1: Dazzle's Snazzi DVC external video capture device, launched last year, captures video from a TV, video recorder or camcorder to a computer.

Camcorder

The family portable camcorder is divided between the old analog camcorder and the now more popular digital camcorder. (Figure 2) Old analog camcorders are Hi8XR, Hi8, V8 and VHS-C. Hi8XR and Hi8 have 440 lines and 400 lines respectively. V8 and VHS-C are only 280 lines and 240 lines respectively. Resolution, lower image quality. The new digital camera has Digital 8 and DV. Both have a resolution of 500 lines or more, and the quality is better than the old analog camcorder. DV machine uses mini mini DV metal tape (Figure 3), so DV body can be very small, while Digital 8 uses a larger 8 cm metal speed, so the body is larger, but Digital 8 can also be compatible with the old style The 8 cm tape means that the 8 cm tape used by the analog camcorder can also be used on the Digital 8 camcorder. Recently, some new DV camcorders also use memory chips as storage media for videos, making them more compact (Figure 4).

Video capture device

If the recorded video is edited, such as deleting unnecessary parts, adding subtitles and background audio, etc., the video can be more interesting and lively. Video editing must rely on video capture devices and personal computer helpers (some digital video recordings have built-in simple video editing functions). Nowadays, personal video capture devices are also very versatile, with easy-to-install PC Cards (for PC Card slots in laptops) and external devices, as well as video capture cards installed on desktop computers. The capture card also has an analog capture card and digital (DV adapter). The former provides A/V, S-Video, Com-posite, or RCA connectors to connect TVs, VHS recorders, analog cameras, etc. Captured on a computer hard disk; Digital card usually provides IEEE1394 (or ilink) interface directly to a digital camcorder, downloads the video to a computer hard disk (or uploads a video from a computer hard disk to a digital camcorder There are also digital connection cards that are compatible with a variety of analog video connection functions at the same time.Compared with analog capture cards and digital connection cards, the analogy capture card and digital connection card are completely different in operation. The former needs to compress the analog video in playback first and then convert it into an AVI file (AVI has many different companies. (The standard); the latter because the DV video has been compressed, you can directly download to the DV connection card, then the DV connection card can be decompressed and saved as an AVI file.Pat-nacle MiroVideo and Dazzle Snazzi are popular video capture devices in Hong Kong. DV, Pyro Digital Video, Canopus DV Raptor, and Matrox Marvel, etc. Most video capture devices come with one or more video editing software. Spent to purchase another software, such as Pin-nacle MiroVideo DV300 / DV200 and Canopus DV Raptor will be included Adobe Premiere5.1 video editing software.

Apple Computer iMac DV/iMovle

General personal computer video editing can be done on a PC or on a Mac. Recently, the iMac DV introduced by Apple Computer is playing a DV slogan, which is also suitable for people or home users, and the price is reasonable. iMac DV is divided into 2 versions, a basic version and a special edition. The two devices are basically the same. The latter has a faster CPU (400 MHz), more RAM (128 Mb) and a larger capacity triangular disk (13 Gb). Because there are already many articles on this machine, the author will only introduce the DV parts related to this article. I recently purchased an iMac DV Special Edition computer and borrowed a Sony digital camcorder for testing from a friend. The pen was never edited before, but I found it very easy to use. As a video editing tool, the iMac DV provides an IEEE1394 digital interface (Figure 6) that is not available on a general PC. It also has an attached cable and iMovie editing software. As long as the digital connection is banned from the digital camcorder to the iMac DV computer, the user can download the captured image from the camcorder to the computer. At this time, the user can use iMovie software for video editing.

Figure 5: Apple Computer iMac DV provides video editing capabilities. Figure 6: Apple iMac DV has two IEEE1394 ports on the side of the computer (Apple calls Firewire/FireWire), which can connect to a digital camcorder or other IEEE1394 peripherals.

iMovle's operating interface is divided into four parts (Figure 7)

iMovie is not a very complicated software, it is suitable for general families or beginners, it can already help users to splicing clips, arrange the order of the clips at random, and can add scene effects (for example, fade in and fade out) between the clips. It can also join scrolling Subtitles or special sound effects can be output to digital camcorders or other digital video products (such as digital video recorders) for storage or playback after editing.

reference:

American Videography Magazine November 1999
Sony1999 Digital8 Handycam Series Catalog Sing Tao Daily PC Buyer DIY Workshop Apple iMovie CD-ROM Manual

Figure 8: The iMovie editing console is divided into four main functions
1. Headline 2, clip effects, 3 background music, and 4 special sound.