I brought out 3 different capture devices. The first one was an external box with a USB connector, made by Dazzle. This is a cheap little unit that does not allow you to capture anything bigger than 320x240 pixels. And even then it dropped some frames during the capture. It worked fine capturing at the very small size of 160x120. This device is really only good for making small video captures worthy of sending as email attachments. Dazzle does make other units capable of capturing better video, like the one we showed at the meeting in January (see February 2002 I/O Port).

The other two capture devices were internal PCI cards. One was the now obsolete TurboTV card, and the other was the ATI TV Wonder VE card. These are very inexpensive TV Tuner cards, each running about $50. Both of them have video capture capabilities up to 720x480 pixels. But both of them came with rather inferior software, so I went out and bought my own video capturing and editing software. The January meeting will cover more about the software.

We used a camcorder to videotape the audience for about 30 seconds, then connected it to the PC and captured the video. We captured it at 352x240 pixels and a bit rate of 2000. We saved it as an MPEG file, and the size ended up being 8.6MB. As you can see, recording video on your PC takes up a lot of room. If you want to record at a better quality bit rate, and a larger pixel size, you can easily take up more than 100MB of disk space per each minute of video. I later edited the clip down to 20 seconds, and reduced it to 320x240 pixels and a bit rate of 800, and it ended up being only 2.3MB. Click on the link below to see the edited video.

The December meeting will be on Software Synthesizers. In January, we will look at different Video Editing software programs, as a follow-up to the video capture card meeting we had this month. Come join the fun at the Harmon Foundation, 2901 S. Harvard, on the third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 PM.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here