RasterWeb!

I rarely watch things like CNN, or any television news really (Hello Internet!) but today I happened to see a bit, and there was a reporter in the field reporting on something, and the video was shot using a videophone!

The quality was poor, but as often is the case with breaking news, being at the right place at the right time, is more important than a polished, high-quality end product.

(Now all we need is more people to realize that they can be the reporter in the field, creating rather than consuming the media…)

I saw Scott and Dave yesterday before I left Milwaukee. Who? I’ll tell ya who…

Scott is in a band called Dashboard Confessional. (I told him they suck… I was joking… or was I? Ha!) Scott used to be in Self Denial, and Cleveland Bound Death Sentence (the original one) and probably some other bands. I’m pretty sure Scott and I were never in a band together, though he did mention that he heard one of my podcasts… Dave on the other hand was in a band with me, and that band was Hardware. (Dave was of course in Self Denial along with Scott.) Dave and I talked briefly via email a while back about releasing some of the old Milwaukee hardcore stuff we used to record. One of these days…

I should have filed this under Where Are They Now? but I didn’t get to talk to them enough to find out where they are now, besides Beans & Barley…

I’m off to the Land of Mary again… And as we all know, Maryland is for crabs…

See ya on the flipside crabby!

Wowza! 75 mph limit proposed for Wisconsin freeways:

…a higher speed limit would save drivers time, save some drivers money on speeding tickets and bring Wisconsin’s limit in line with a third of the nation’s states that already have the higher limit.

It would not save them money for gas, however. (Damn!)

“Cars are engineered these days in a way which can better handle a little higher speeds,” Reynolds said. “It’s a slowly emerging trend.” (Not mine! See below…)

“Speed doesn’t kill. It’s the speed differential that causes accidents.” (???)

My only worry is that my car (affectionately referred to as ‘the crapmobile’) starts to wobble pretty bad when going over 65, so there’s a good chance it’ll wobble itself off the road and down an embankment if I attempt to go 75 miles per hour, killing me and leaving no one around to update this web site…

Other than that little concern, Zoooooooom!

I would have called this Analog Video How To but I don’t really consider it a very comprehensive How To… It’s really just a description of my set-up.

I don’t have a digital video camera for the stuff I do on tinkernet, I use an old JVC VHS camcorder I picked up around 2000 or so. It records to little VHS tapes that hold 30 minutes of video. I rarely shoot more than 5 or 10 minutes for most stuff I do, and edit it down to less than 2 minutes for the final product anyway.

Besides the camera, I use two devices, a Griffin iMic USB audio adapter and an XLR8 InterView USB video capture device. These convert the analog signals from the camera into digital files on the computer. You’ll need to plug them into the USB ports on the computer. I’d try to plug the XLR8 InterView right into the computer instead of a hub, as you may see better performance. (If your computer has a sound input port either built-in or on a card, you probably won’t need the iMic, but I do for my Quicksilver – yes, I use a Mac.)

The image above shows the camera with two cables, the video cable has an RCA connector on each side. This one connects to the XLR8 InterView to carry the video.

The other cable needs to have an RCA connector on one end, and a small audio connector on the other, as it will connect to the Griffin iMic to carry the audio signal. (You can probably use an RCA cable with a small adapter on the end, ask your local A/V geek at Radio Shack.)

Once it’s all connected, you launch the USBVision Capture (well, that’s what the OS X app is called) and start to play the tape, and you can capture the video (and audio) to your computer. It’ll create a movie file, which you can then convert to another format using the USBVision Exporter application. (Both of these apps came with the XLR8 InterView, they can pretty much do what QuickTime Pro can as far as saving and converting formats.)

Typically I will capture the video, then convert it to a DV Stream file, which will make it huge, but will allow you to import it into iMovie where you can edit until you have a masterpiece worthy of the presenting to the videoblogging Yahoo! Group. ;)

I’m not going to get into the editing or encoding or compressing part of creating your final video, as the folks at Freevlog cover that much better than I can…

If you have any questions on this setup, or suggestions as to how to do it better or what not, let me know. I pretty much figured all this out by digging around the wonderful web, and a lot of testing and trial and error. Good Luck! Make some video!