Video Project Progress

Well, I *finally* have all twelve tapes on hard-disk, a process called "Ingest" in the biz.

I had some real hair pulling moments doing this, as somewhere along the line, the audio settings in Windoze got changed, and seven of the twelve tapes recorded without sound.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

After I re-recorded them and stopped the capture, Premiere Pro would hang up with a "Conforming XXXX.AVI" message, and the progress bar indicating it was saving to disk never budged. After a few minutes of this, the program would stop responding, and die.

Took me most of a day, a lot of head scratching and book reading (Yes, I *do* RTFM), and prowling the Adobe Premiere Pro forums, but I figured it out. The bit rate between what Windoze had the sound card set to, and what Premiere Pro was using, didn't match, causing a huge problem that Premier Pro tried to correct, by transcoding the audio (part of the "Conforming" process) to the bit rate used for DVD.

WELL.......if the bit rates are different enough, it can take forever to resample the original audio stream, and convert it to the new rate.

And in some cases, it simply can't be done without causing big "holes" in the data stream, which the program won't accept, and so you spiral down in flames, waiting for the job to finish.

SO, now that I have all the tapes *properly* recorded to disk, I assigned the "In Points" and "Out Points" to each of the 18 "clips" I made from the twelve tapes. The "Ins" and "Outs" are simply the points at which the video starts to play, and are used to eliminate the first few crummy/bad/distorted frames of video that the camcorder produces when it first starts to record. They're used for other things, like selecting where you want to do other stuff, but for now that's how I'm using them.

Now "all" I have to do is to assemble the clips in a sequence, add the transitions ("Fade To Black" stuff) between the clips, make sure the completed sequence will fit on a DVD, and save each sequence as a "Project".

That will complete the editing portion of the project, and I can go on to "author" the DVD using Adobe Encore, and then burn the DVDs for my brother-in-law. He says his kids, now fully grown with their own children, have never seen the tapes.

The reason I built a studio-grade PC hardware and software suite, was that I wanted to be able to capture HD video from the Component Video jacks on the back of my DirecTV box, back when I had DirecTV.

I literally bought EVERY "consumer grade" video capture device on the market, and tried them all. Some of them has S-Video inputs, and a couple had "component video" inputs, and they ALL used USB to connect to the PC.

They ALL sucked, producing at best, video that looked like a VHS tape.

So, I bit the bullet, and bought a Matrox RT.X2 video capture card, which came bundled with a full version of Adobe Premiere Pro.

While this is still a top-notch video capture and editing system, times have changed, and now there are little stand-alone boxes that will actually do HD video, and they cost a whole lot less than what I paid for my hardware.

But then again, we're paying about the same for 40MB fiber-to-the-home as I was for my dual ISDN lines that gave me 128kB back in 1997, and those dollars were a whole bunch bigger.