hot damn! it works!
May. 27th, 2006 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
topazWhen Morgan was born, my parents bought us a Hitachi 8mm camcorder to make sure we would have lots of opportunities to bore them to tears with home movies. Well, the years have gone by and Old Paint has developed a rattling, grinding noise in the motor that actually gets recorded on tape whenever you're taking a movie, so we haven't been using it much the last few years.
So last Christmas I bought Ellen (read: me) a new camcorder, a Sony Mini-DV gadget. The thing that really appealed to my inner frustrated film geek, of course, was having a video camera with Firewire output so we could actually edit the movies and possibly make them a little more interesting, or hopefully at least less boring.
My parents are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary all summer this year, and last weekend held a little family reunion. Great excuse to bring the camera! I caught as much tape as I could get of our cousins, aunts and uncles reminiscing about growing up with Mom & Dad. Lots of fun.
But this is all precursor. The point is that I still don't know how I'm going to get the footage off the camera! I didn't even have the right kind of Firewire cable until this week. My options are really to download the video onto Ellen's iBook or my Dell, which is running Linux. The iBook is far and away the most obvious and sensible choice for anything like this, but the prospect of negotiating with Ellen for a time-share on her laptop so I could edit video seemed.... unappealing. :-) I could try copying it to my machine, I guess, but.... editing video? on Linux?
So imagine my surprise when, upon installing the first video editing package I could find, Kino, that It All Just Works. I had to run Kino as root, and I had to check a FAQ to remind me that it was important to put the camcorder in Play/VCR mode, but after that it just did the right thing. Hitting the rewind button on the application told the camera to rewind, and hitting "Capture" made it start to pull video off the camera and save it to disk.
Of course, 5 minutes of video expands to the better part of a gigabyte of data in raw DV format. Now I'm going to need another disk.... :-)
So last Christmas I bought Ellen (read: me) a new camcorder, a Sony Mini-DV gadget. The thing that really appealed to my inner frustrated film geek, of course, was having a video camera with Firewire output so we could actually edit the movies and possibly make them a little more interesting, or hopefully at least less boring.
My parents are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary all summer this year, and last weekend held a little family reunion. Great excuse to bring the camera! I caught as much tape as I could get of our cousins, aunts and uncles reminiscing about growing up with Mom & Dad. Lots of fun.
But this is all precursor. The point is that I still don't know how I'm going to get the footage off the camera! I didn't even have the right kind of Firewire cable until this week. My options are really to download the video onto Ellen's iBook or my Dell, which is running Linux. The iBook is far and away the most obvious and sensible choice for anything like this, but the prospect of negotiating with Ellen for a time-share on her laptop so I could edit video seemed.... unappealing. :-) I could try copying it to my machine, I guess, but.... editing video? on Linux?
So imagine my surprise when, upon installing the first video editing package I could find, Kino, that It All Just Works. I had to run Kino as root, and I had to check a FAQ to remind me that it was important to put the camcorder in Play/VCR mode, but after that it just did the right thing. Hitting the rewind button on the application told the camera to rewind, and hitting "Capture" made it start to pull video off the camera and save it to disk.
Of course, 5 minutes of video expands to the better part of a gigabyte of data in raw DV format. Now I'm going to need another disk.... :-)
