| Chris Hedemark on Wed, 5 Feb 2003 06:42:16 -0500 |
|
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Firewire would definately be better for video. I don't know about Firewire support in Linux. USB support is there. USB support was played with on some low end cameras. My prosumer class camera has a USB connection, but only for pulling still out. USB 1.0 simply doesn't have the bandwidth necessary, and USB 2.0 was too little too late. The industry has already standardized on firewire. Buying a USB camera today expecting better support to come along would be a dire mistake. I tried using a cheap USB webcam and found the quality to be unacceptable. I got better results with a video capture card and a real camcorder, even though the camcorder is aged. I also heard that two streaming USBs cameras use too much bandwitdh on the USB bus. Not likely with Firewire. You can have multiple cameras on firewire, but the problem then becomes the speed that your HDD can write two video streams to disk. With a single IDE drive in my laptop, my machine is working pretty hard just to keep up with one camera. Digital makes sense if your interfacing with a computer since you would otherwise need to convert to digital anyway. With digital you have several advantages, among which (not exclusive) include: 1) No degredation of original media after multiple playbacks. Assuming the physical media itself doesn't degrade, theoretically playback #100 is just as clear as #1. Can't do that on VHS. 2) No degredation of footage over generations. Every time you run your footage to another media, that's another generation. Many movies have been terribly degraded in post production because you are essentially making a copy of a copy of a copy with analog media by the time you get to the movie theater. It can be a dozen generations removed from the original camera footage. With digital, your final edited and bulk-copied product looks as good as what came out of the camera (or better, if you apply color correction and other clean-up techniques). Ever notice how low-budget shows today like the MTV reality shows are coming up with sharp looking footage with really crappy camera work and editing? They are 100% digital. They use digital cameras, edited on Macs with Final Cut Pro, and sent directly to broadcast on digital media. Low budget shows even just five years ago had a much worse picture quality. Little guys like me can now make much more professional looking product with a lot less money. For about $2,000 minimum investment you can do pretty decent looking one camera shoots edited through something free like Cinelerra or iMovie (though if you stick with the Cinelerra hardware specs your investment may need to be more than that). These days you can get a broadcast quality camera like the Canon XL1S for the neighborhood of $3,000 and it will plug into your NLE solution as easily as a low end $600 consumer camera. The editing is the same. Sound like I'm excited? We're in the middle of a video revolution here. Digital video and NLE is a really big deal. The manufacturers all agreeing on MiniDV, the DV codec, and Firewire has changed everything. Chris Hedemark PGP/GnuPG Public Key at http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (Darwin) iD8DBQE+QPhEYPuF4Zq9lvYRAqsTAJ9IC1H+cy4FV7SMJ2eT3vhMd6tvSgCg96v9 krRh9sIwhFoOw8ENJ/CE6ZE= =FB2b -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
|
|