Re: grey squares on video

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 6:08 AM, sattress <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello,
> I am a kinetic sculptor that works with discarded technology. I make videos
> of my sculptures, particularly those that are hired by restaurants. I have

That is awesome! The picture you attached is intriguing.

> used windows (found copies of win 98SE and W2k). I am trying to move to
> linux. The last hurdle, and the one that I have failed to clear multiple
> times is capturing video. I have been lent a Panasonic NV-DX100 digital
> video camera (PAL/dv) and have made many videos that other have enjoyed
> using u-lead and nero.
>   In shifting to Linux, I have run kino on different PC's and laptops with
> different distros. I can capture and make mpeg files. At all stages, and in
> all my attempts, I have five grey squares that sit solidly and
> unattractively through all the stages of capturing editing and rendering. I

I think I have seen the problem you describe, but I do not see it in
the image you attached. Is it supposed to be in the image, or was that
just a promotional image?

> hoped, because some said that the quality might not be good during the
> capture/edit process that it might all come right on the mpeg file. Sadly

The first thing to understand is that DV capture is not a conversion
process; it is a data transfer. The DV is stored digitally on the tape
in your camcorder and then the digital data is transferred over
firewire to your computer. Think of it in terms of capturing a
streaming video from the Internet over Ethernet - it is very similar
at a high level. This means - if my belief about the problem you
describe is correct - that there appears to be some unrecoverable data
loss or data error in what was captured. Is this problem persistent
throughout the recording or just a very short time? Is this a problem
with all captures?

The next thing to understand is that editing DV in Kino is not
destructive to the DV data and therefore the image (unless there is a
nasty memory bug, but that is quite rare now IMO). This means that if
you do not use FX, then you retain maximum possible quality because
the video is not converted - the project is merely referencing
sections of the recordings. If you do use FX and Render, then as long
as Kino is built to use FFmpeg (usually it is), then there is a slight
quality loss through the phases of decoding DV, processing the image,
and re-encoding back to DV.

A conversion to MPEG-2 would lose substantially more quality. So, the
advice you received is completely backwards, but they probably do not
know how Kino works nor are experts in DV.

> no.
>   I am woefully ignorant re the inner workings of Linux but will try
> anything and have time to learn from mistakes.
> Paul
>
-- 
+-DRD-+

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