Anyone record video for web

azezil

What equipment do you use, and what software?

Inspector Gadget

Azezil:

If you can fill in a few blanks, maybe we can give you accurate, useful answers rather than just generalities.

1) What kind of video recording kit have you? I'm presuming a camcorder or something, but...
2) How can you get video into your PC? (capture cards/firewire/etc)
3) Do you want live streaming (as it happens) or to put the video up for viewing after it's been recorded?
4) If the answer to (2) is "put the video up for viewing after it's been recorded", do you want it to be streamable from a server (start watching now) or just a regular vanilla video file (download first, view later)
5) Who are your target audience, and what do they use (OS, 'net connection speeds, and so on)

Gadget

azezil

I'm working on an assignment

You have been commissioned to develop a 30 second online video promotion for Thurles racecourse.

You must identify at each stage of the video production process the tools that will be used. The cost of them (where appropiate). Discussions regarding frame rates, resolution etc for both video and sound should be included.

A storyboard and an outline script is required. The script should contain details about sound effects, scenes and from what angles you wish to shoot the scene.

Remember that price and quality matter so the most expensive solution may not be the most viable.

Since posting that i've made some progress I have the story board, frame rates etc. i'll figure out later, i decided on what kind of video format i want it in, but i'm not sure about camera's. Types, cost etc.

Inspector Gadget

Hmm... you still haven't answered my questions, but maybe that's because you don't know the answers. (I'm not trying to be a smart-ar$e when I say that, by the way)

How about this:

Easiest/most expensive:
Digital Video (DV) camcorder + Firewire to get video into PC + Software (something like Adobe Premiere) to do mixing.

Most difficult/least expensive:
TV capture card (something like one of those Studio PCTV things, one with S-Video in - can be got for about E70 or so) + standard analogue camcorder (8mm tape is better than VHS-C, Hi-8 = practically Broadcast quality) = big AVI; use tools like VirtualDub (.org - free, if clunky, video editor) + (say) DivX 5.0 codec, or run through an MPEG-1 encoder (such as the free TMPGEnc (.net))

In between lie many options - too many to list.

Maximum feasible resolutions/framerates/bitrates depend almost completely on bandwidth (if streaming) or how small you want the file to be (if download-first-play-after). Forget resolutions of higher than about 320x240 or lower than about 160x120 (postage stamp), frame rates should be between 15-25 fps (remember, some encoders, such as Windows Media Encoder, can vary the framerates according to how the detail in the scene changes) and the audio/video bitrates, well, they'll decide the quality of the output.

Remember that 56kbits/s is pushing it a bit for a modem - you'll be looking at about 42kbits/s reasonably - and above that you'll be playing to an ISDN/ADSL/Cable world, so there's no point going below ~60kbits/s (single-channel ISDN = 64kbits/s) or ~120kbits/s (dual-channel ISDN). After that, then, the sky's the limit. Remember that these rates are tiny - standard Pal TV MPEG-1, for example, is 320x240x24.97fps, with an 1150kbits/s CBR (constant bit rate) MPEG-1 video stream and a 224kbits/sec CBR MPEG-1 Layer 2 Joint Stereo audio stream - add these up, and you get closer to 150kbytes/s.

Another things you should look at (and price) is MPEG-4 (designed for low-bandwidth stuff - DivX is based on it).

Happy hunting...
Gadget

azezil

well i gave you the question as it was given to me

anyway i'm thinking a 30sec add for the race course, download and play.

I'm thinking Bink format cause its smaller and better quality than mpeg and its standalone so people won't have to download plugins.

As for bandwidth etc. i dunno that's entirely up to me.

azezil

just checking out Adobe Premiere 6.0, looks like exactly what i need. cheers

strat

DivX 3.11 Alpha ;-)

Inspector Gadget

Azezil:

You may notice that the Bink tool that produces self-playing movies only produces Win32 executables - no Mac, no Unix, etc. The nice thing about MPEG-1 is that it's supported everywhere - Quicktime & Windows Media Player both do it natively, and there are free downloads for Unix that do the job too. The quality isn't as good like-for-like (in terms of bandwidth/file size) but it is more compatible...

Just my 2c...
Gadget