CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [355]
Last, a good approach almost always is to reinstall the application.
Video Capture
A microphone, sound card, and software enable you to capture audio, but with a camera capable of capturing full motion video as well as sound, you can turn the PC into your very own movie studio. This is called video capture. To capture video from a source requires you to have the proper hardware installed to provide an interface with the camcorder or video player and, if the source is analog, provide translation of the signal as well; plus you need a properly configured application to do the capturing. Once captured, you can use an application to edit the video file. Then save it in some form for upload a la YouTube or save it to DVD or other removable media.
Hardware
You need the proper hardware installed to capture video. From a digital signal, such as a modern camcorder that records directly to its own internal solid state hard drive, you simply run a cable from the FireWire out port on the camcorder to the FireWire port on your computer. If the camcorder doesn’t offer FireWire, it’ll most likely use Hi-Speed USB. When capturing from an analog source, such as a VHS cassette player or a Hi-8 tape, you’ll need some kind of connection and translation hardware.
The Pinnacle blueBox pictured in Figure 20-25, for example, offers two different dedicated video connections (S-Video on the left and the RCA jack next to it), stereo RCA audio jacks, plus a FireWire port (on the expansion card for it) for direct connection to FireWire onboard the camcorder. The breakout box uses a proprietary connection to plug into the PC.
Figure 20-25 A video capture device
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NOTE The FireWire connection seems redundant—just go straight to FireWire on the PC, right? But it’s there to accomplish two goals. First, many PCs don’t have a FireWire port, so you would either need to add a FireWire expansion card or use a different type of port. Second, Sony produced a series of Hi-8 camcorders some years ago that had FireWire connectors. Some translation has to happen to turn the analog signal digital.
You need a decent-grade computer with lots of free hard drive space and a substantial amount of RAM to import the video and audio streams from an external source. And you’ll certainly need a serious processor when it comes time to edit and compile a new video from the source material. There’s no simple rule for how much of any resource you’ll need. Different projects have different demands on the hardware. If you’re setting up a new computer for video capture, the simple rule is to get as powerful a system as possible with as much hard drive and RAM capacity as you can afford.
Once you have the hardware in place, the true heavy lifting in video capture falls on the software.
Software
With video editing applications, such as Pinnacle Studio or Apple Final Cut, you can import video and then work with it directly. Figure 20-26 shows the former software capturing video and audio translated through the Pinnacle blueBox from a Hi-8 camcorder. Most webcams—even those built into portable computers—are analog, rather than digital devices. Thus, some software automatically creates break points in the import to make the editing process easier.
Figure 20-26 Importing video in Adobe Premier Elements
The video editing software enables you to take video and audio from one or many sources and arrange clips into a time line. You can add and edit various transitions between clips, shorten clips, and so on. Figure 20-27 shows the storyboard from Final Cut Pro and a how-to video my team produced in-house.
Figure 20-27 Editing in Final Cut Pro
Once you’ve finished the editing process, you can export to a file for archiving, sending out on optical disc, or posting to a video sharing site. With an audio file, as discussed earlier, this is a simple process. You pick