Army of Darkness Videos Technical Information
I'm using a Sony
dcr-trv9 Digital Video Camera mounted to the gas tank cap of our practice Suzuki GSXR 600. The mount is made by 'Grampa's Tools' in Atlanta Georgia (saw an ad in the AMA rag I think). The camera is set to 'sport' mode (exposure) and the focus is locked on infinity. The camera has an image stabilization (steady shot) feature which is turned on.
The next purchase was a
DPS Spark IEEE1394 'firewire' SCSI card for my Dell PII 450. The Dell was ordered with an 80mb/sec 9 GB Ultra2 Wide SCSI drive which allows for fast downloads with no frames dropped. Combined with the NVIDIA TNT2 3D card you have a kick ass Quake computer. But I digress.
Plugging the camera into the 1394 port and downloading the video with the spark software is very straightforward. The 1:35 minutes of Gingerman video ate up 380 MB of hard drive space. Adobe Premiere 5.0 is used to strip the AVI down to 10 fps, 320 x 240 and 41 MB. DVMpeg is used to convert the AVI to Mpeg which compresses it down to 4.9 mb.
It's at the last stage where tough decisions are made. DVMpeg has some configuration templates for noisy/fast moving video that I've been using with some success. Then it's just a matter of selecting the bytes/sec (quality vs. size) that I want. I usually opt for about a 30% reduction in bytes /sec.
In the near future when we all have broadband connections 5mb downloads won't be an issue. But for now I'd like to be able to compress these down further (to around 2mb) for all of those hapless modem users out there. If you're an expert at Mpeg compression I'd appreciate some tips. On the flip side if you have a T3 and want to see the really nice 41mb AVI drop me a note and I'll post it.
Jim
cartman@n0spam.13x.com (drop the n0spam to e-mail me)