It needs a PowerMac mac with AV video card (it's only been tested with the Apple AV cards and XClaim VR Card, but if the AV card manufacturer follows the Apple Quicktime API, it should work), QuickTime™ 2.x (3.0 preferred) and the QuickTime™ PowerPlug (must have this for the PowerMac version). MyVidCap does have Ballon Help available which explains most of what the menus and dialogs do.
For people using Quicktime 3, you can now record to multiple hard drives so that when the first - primary hard drive is nearly full, Quicktime will switch to a second hard drive and continue recording to that. Additionally, you can also have the Audio recorded to another hard drive, making it possible to have your AV recording session done to 3 hard drives at the same time (ie video recorded to 2 hard drives so that the second one will be used when the first is nearly full and the audio to a slower hard drive).
It can also play low data rate movies (like Midi) in the background too.
Lastly, we added Apple Script support so that you can use Apple Scripts to:
1) "Select Video Window" - which Bring the video window to the foreground or creates the video window if it doesn't exist yet
2) "Take Picture <as pict named yyyyy>" - which grabs a snap shot picture of the video window and optionally allows you to name the pict to something other than our date stamped pict.
3) "Record Video for xx.xx as movie named yyyyyy" - which records video for specified "xx.xx" duration in seconds and save it as a named movie "yyyyy"
Theoretically, it is now possible to have MyVidCap grab pict snap shots at a specified time to a specific folder (for posting to a web site or security snap shots) or to have MyVidCap record a short video segment at a specified time (like the evening news or a commercial or a weather report), without you being around to control it.
Firstly, you should have Virtual Memory or Ram doubler turned off as it isn't giving you "Real Ram" and having it on will result in poor - eratic video capture. You should also have any unnecesary extensions turned off, other than the ones like Quicktime, Quicktime PowerPlug, SystemAV, video card / digitizer card extensions etc. I find that Speed Doubler doesn't help video capture either, and that a big Disk Cache (memory Control Panel) should generally be set down as low as possible (under OS 8.1 this doesn't seem to be as crucial). You should also have Appletalk and networking stuff turned off too, as they can cause video to be captured poorly.
For optimum capture to disk, we recomend you only capture to a hard drive or partion on a hard drive that is completely empty. Even a defragmented hard drive or partion that has files/applications on it may capture poorly, especially if your trying to get accurate frame rate captures (ie you want 15 fps capture and the actual capture rate you get does not vary more than ± 0.5 fps from it). Secondly, the capture rate is going to depend on how fast the video images can be transfered from the AV card to your hard drive, so a fast or fast wide hard drive is important if you want to capture at >15 fps. Please read the MVC - Optimizing Performance document for more info on getting good video capture.
Setting the Memory Partion for MyVidCap
Depending on what video card your using for digitizing and your Ram / Hard disk space situation, you have essentially 3 choices for where video is grabbed to, directly to disk, to the available temporary memory or to available Ram inside of the MyVidCap memory partiton. So first select the My Vid Cap application and then choose Get Info from the File menu. Once the Info window appears, select the bottom most field labelled "Preferred Size:" and use the following guidelines for setting the memory allocation.
1) For Capture to disk, set Preferred Size value to 2 to 8 megs (2048 to 8192K). Giving it more Ram will doesn't hurt, but it won't make a significant difference except for playing back movies.After you launch MyVidCap, you must also make sure the "Record To Ram" menu item is unchecked. You may also want to specify which hard drive or folders the temporary Quicktime video gets grabbed to using the Preferences… menu item under the Digitizer menu and whether to post compress the video too.
2) For Capture to Ram WITHOUT temporary memory, set Preferred Size value to about 4 to 6 megabytes less than the currently available Ram in your Mac. From the Desktop, select the Apple menu and choose the "About this Macintosh" item and then see what the Largest Unused Block is. So if your largest unused block is 42 megs, set the Preferred Size value for MyVidCap to about 38912 which is 38 megs. After you launch MyVidCap, you'll also have to check the "Record To Ram" menu item and make sure "Use Temp Mem" menu item is unchecked under the Digitizer Menu.
3) For Capture to Ram USING Temporary Memory, set the Preferred Size value to about 2048 (2 megs). Temporary memory is the memory that is not used by the System or any currently running applications. If you close the Info window, double click on the MyVidCap application, then click on the desktop and choose "About this Macintosh" form the Apple menu, the available memory for video capture will be whatever the "Largest Unused Block" size is. So if you have 48 megs of Ram, your system uses 6 megs and you have 2 megs allocated to MyVidCap, you have about 40 megs of temporary memory to use for video capture (which at 320x240 size, 30 fps using the YUV compressor will give you about 9 seconds of video). After you launch MyVidCap, you'll also have to check the "Record To Ram" menu item and make sure "Use Temp Mem" menu item is checked under the Digitizer Menu.
The "MVC - Optimizing Performance" document discusses a 4th option that allows you to capture audio to memory and the video to disk, which provides an additional performance Tweak.
Other Settings inside of MyVidCap
Once the memory Size is set, double click on the Application and then click on the File menu. If there is a video capture card installed, the Open Video Window item will be available, so select it. If you can't select (it's grayed out), your monitor color depth may be too high (on the 6100 - 8100 AV macs, video capture is only possible at 000's of colors or lower on a 14" monitor), the capture card your using isn't installed right (you may need a VDIG or other software from the card's manufacturer) or you don't have the QuickTime extensions in the Extension folder.
If you get "-9405 Bad channel video" error message after you select Open Video Window, MyVidCap is having problems talking to the Video Digitizer software because it has not been loaded into ram. This usually means that another extension has "hogged" the heap space and it can not be loaded. We've found that this can be resolved in most cases by re-naming the extensions so that all the quicktime and video digitizer extensions load right after each other and no other extensions load between them.
For example, with Quicktime 3.b11 and the ATI Xclaim software installed, I would continually get -9405 errors with all video capture software I tried, so it was not a problem with exclusively MyVidCap. Watching the extensions that got loaded during re-start showed that the ATI extensions appeared (loaded) first, then Global fax software, then the Quicktime extensions. I put a "•" in front of the global fax extension names so that they load last and the problem disapears. So you may have to "juggle" the order in which extensions load to allow the digitizer to be loaded.
After you select it, the Video Window will appear. Now the Digitizer Menu will be selectable and you should next set the size of the capture window, Video Settings use for capture, the Audio settings, whether to record to ram or disk and whether video should play back to the video window during your video recoding. These settings are saved in your Preference Folder as the "MVC Prefs" item when you quit the "My Vid Cap" application.
Next choose the size of the video window (select one of the 160x120 to 640x480 items). If you are using an 8mm, SVHS or Beta Video source, you can use 320x240 or larger (if the card can do it), but for most consumer grade video tapes (Standard VHS or tape rentals) there isn't enough resolution (lines of video) in the source tape to really go beyond 320x240 size. The Custom 640x480… size item allows you to specify a custom width x height that you enter into a dialog.
Next select the Video Settings… item and select the Image, Compression and Source (± AV options with the AV Digitizer Options extension installed for the 6100/7100/8100 AV macs) options you want to use. For people using Apple's AV or XClaim VR cards, I'd suggest you try using the "Component Video" codec, which produces the best video quality (24 bit color) and is the fastest video capturer codec there is without spending a lot of money on JPEG compression boards. On the down side YUV capture plays back a bit jerky at larger sizes and higher frame rates for the 6100/7100/8100 series which don't have hardware decompression of YUV. On the upside, you can grab at a small size (which translates to faster capture rates and less disk/memory used) and have the built in pixel doubling hardware play it back at twice the original size with minimal video degradation. Two other options you might want to try are "None" or the "Video" compressors, but they don't grab as good a quality as the YUV option. Note: You can adjust the Video display settings (Brightness contrast etc.) while your watching video using the HBSCS buttons, which are discussed later on.
Next choose the Audio Settings… item and select the Compression, Sample and Source options you want to use.Generally I'd stick to 44.100 Khz or 22.050 khz, 16 bit uncompressed (none compression) sound (choose stereo if you want or can use it). Although you can compress the sound, this compression does take time away from Grabbing video, so compressing the sound after you grab it (with another utility) is a better solution.The amount of memory / disk space that sound uses can be calculates out using the following formula: Note: You can adjust the Audio settings (Volume, Gain etc.) while your watching video using the VGM buttons, which are discussed later on.
Kilobytes of sound per second = SoundDepth/8 * SoundRateinHz * NumChannels / 1024
For 22.050 Khz 8 bit mono sound, each second of video uses 21.53 Kilobytes of memory (8/8 * 22050 *1/1024) and 44.1Khz 16 bit stereo sound it uses 172.26 Kilobytes per second (10.1 megabytes of memory per minute).
There are two more settings you are going to select next, Record to Ram and Play During Record.
Selecting Record to Ram will check mark it (or uncheck it if it's selected) so that the movie capture will be recorded to available Ram and leaving it unchecked will record the movie to disk. The Use Temp Mem item determines where in Ram the video is grabbed to. If it's checked, then the video capturer will capture the video to Temporary Memory (which is the Ram available in your mac not currently allocated to the system or an application) and if you check it, then the video is captured to the available memory inside of MyVidCap.
Selecting Play During Record will check mark it (or uncheck it if it's selected) so that the video is always displayed during the Video Capture process. If you uncheck it, the video will only be displayed if the mac can keep up with your frame rate and save the video. And most of the newer PowerMacs are fast enough to display the video during capture, so this option may not affect playthrough.
The Show Megs Left option will display the amount of disk/memory space left during capture (nothing shows up till your recording). It does not have any impact on video capture rate, so I'd pretty much leave it check marked.
Digitizer Preferences
The Preferences… item at the end of the Digitizer menu allow you to select default locations (folder on a hard drive) for where the video - audio gets recorded to and four other parameters. The default location you select is used whenever that hard drive is available and if it isn't currently mounted, it will use the folder/drive that MyVidCap resides in.
The Select 1st Capture Location… button specifies which hard drive/folder you want your movies captured to.
The Select 2nd Capture Location… button specifies which hard drive/folder you want to record to if the first capture location becomes full during a record operation. Once you've selected a location the "Daisy Chain to XXXX" checkbox will be available. Checking this item indicates you want quicktime to continue recording to this hard drive if the first drive becomes full and unchecking means you do not want to use it. This is only available if your using Quicktime 3 or higher.
MyVidCap will now save up to 24 gigabytes of video if you have that much space available on your hard drive(s).
The Select Audio Location… button specifies which hard drive/folder you want the Audio recorded to. Once you've picked your location, the Save Audio to xxxx checkbox will be available. Checking this item indicates you want to record the Audio to a differnt file / hard drive. This is only available if your using Quicktime 2.5 or higher.
Here's the neat thing. If the hard drives you picked for the default save locations are not mounted when you go to capture, MVC will use the folder that it resides in to capture video to. However, if you then mount the hard drive and re-launch MVC, it will automautically use them, without you having to re-set the default locations.
You can also have your Saved recorded video clip being Post Compressed using MJPEG A compression (which results in about 4 to 1 video compression, reducing the file size to 25% of the original without a significant loss of video quality) when you Save it. The PostCompression is done on a frame by frame basis, so you don't wind up with duplicate video frames.
On a 7300/200 PowerMac, MJPEG A at 320x240 size plays back really well at 15 FPS and lower end machines should be able to play it back at 240x180 or 160x120 with no problems.
You also have an additional choice of either doing the compression in "Fast Mode", which prevents video frames from being drawn during compression and reduces the compression time by 10 to 30%.
Also, the current movie size is used for Saving the post compressed video, so if you initally capture the video at say 240x180 size, then double size the window (to 480 x 360), select a portion of the movie and then choose Save, the movie saved to disk will be at 480 x 360 size. The same applies if you make the movie half or some other size.
The Auto Set Snd ChunkSize check box allows MVE to automatically adjust the sound chunk size for your current recording session (taking into account the frame rate you want to capture at and the audio settings you've selected). We recommend you check this item, which will generally result in more consistent capture rates and fewer dropped video frames.
The Use Which Video field: pop up menu allows you to select which fields of the video to grab. Normally you'll just select the Any item, which allows the digitizer to choose it's own preference. The two other options are Odd or Even fields. I've found that with some VCR tapes, using Odd or Even frames will sometimes prevent video synchronization problems (half of a frame gets drawn with another frame - so you see a sharp "break" in the video).
The Maximum time to record allows you to specify the maximum time to record any given sequence, in seconds. Setting it to 0 lets the capture continue until you run out of recording space (Hard Drive or Ram).
The H S B C S and V G M "buttons" and Sound Bar
Near the bottom left corner of the Video window are two small composite button entited "H S B C S" and "V G M", which allows you to adjust most of the Video display and Audio settings WITHOUT using a Dialog or floating window. Frankly, I hate having 5 additional floating windows that appear and dissappear as I flip from a capture application to another application and waste - clutter up valuable monitor space.
The "H S B C S" button allows you to change video display settings and stand for Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast and Sharpness, in the same order as displayed in the Video Settings Dialog. To adjust the Brightness, place the arrow cursor over the "B" part of the "H S B C S" button and click the mouse. The "B" will invert, meaning it's active. Now hold down the Left Arrow"<--" key to darken the image or hold down the Right Arrow "-->" to Brighten the image. To select another Setting, just click on it and then adjust it up or down using the Arrow keys. Re-Clicking on one of the button parts will turn it off, so if the "H" is hilighted, then clicking on it again will turn it off. When you click on a button, the value of that setting is displayed in white text (ie 51.3) to the right of it. As you use the arrow keys, the value will increase/decrease.
The "V G M" button allows you to change audio settings and stand for Volume, Gain and Mute.
The Volume setting affects the input setting of the digitizer, not the volume of the mac, and frankly doesn't "do" anything. Future releases of MVC may change this and link the V button to the volume of your mac, so that changing it changes the sound volume.
To adjust the sound input Gain, place the arrow cursor over the "G" part of the "V G M" button and click the mouse. The "G" will hilite, meaning it's active. Now hold down the Left Arrow"<--" key to lower the gain or hold down the Right Arrow "-->" to raise the gain. To select another Setting, just click on it and then adjust it up or down using the Arrow keys. The Mute button is either On (darkened/ hilited) or Off (unhilted) and the Arrow cursors don't affect it. Re-Clicking on one of the button parts will turn it off, so if the "G" is hilighted, then clicking on it again will turn it off.
To the right of the "V G M" button is a thin gray strip that shows the sound volume in real time. A small white block indicates the maximum sound volume that has occured within the last 3 seconds. If you have selected Stereo sound in the Audio Settings dialog, the bar will be split into 2 strips, with the upper strip being the Left channel and the Lower Bar being the right channel.
Side Note: The HSBCS button values are reported with decimal places, which is not possible to set with the Digitizer dialog. The reason for this is that the value of Brightness (and the other ones) is a number between 0 and 65535, which is "re-mapped" to a value of 100 in the Digitizer dialog. You can actually adjust the HSBCS values much more precisely using the left - right arrow keys (in increments of 0.2%).
Cropping Video
Under the Digitizer menu are five items you can use to crop the video before recording it. PLEASE note that the Xclaim VR card does not work properly with clipping and the cropping menu items will not be enabled if your using it.
Use Cropping (Command J) allows you to Turn on (if a cropped area was previously defined) or Turn Off Cropping.
The other four items allow you to define an area for cropping at 160x120, 240x180, 320x240 or a custom size you specify. The Video window must be greater than or equal to the dimensions of the area that are to be cropped, so if you make the video window 160x120 size, you can't crop an area 320x240. After selecting one of the four items, the cursor changes to a "plus" and you position it inside the Digitizer window and then click and hold down the mouse. A rectangle will appear and as you drag the mouse around inside the window a second rectangle will appear that shows you what area is going to be Cropped to. Release the mouse button and your cropping will stick there. You can turn on or off this defined Crop area using Command J.
How to Record Video
Once you ar ready to record the video (ie it's playing in the Video Window), all you have to do it select the Record (Command - R) item from the Digitizer menu. With the Show Megs Left item checked, the time recorded and megabytes left will be displayed at the bottom of the video capture window (T: xx M:xxx). To Stop video capture, click the mouse. If you are capturing to Ram, the cursor will change to a watch cursor while the movie in ram is saved to disk. After this, the movie will appear in it's own window (Cap #1, Cap #2 etc.) and you can play it back using the standard movie controllers. The items in the Edit and Movie menu will now be available, so that you can have it Loop, Loop Back and Forth, play the Selection Only, Cut / Copy / Paste / Trim and reduce or expand the dimensions of the movie window.
Normally the first few frames of the video you have recorded will have large delays (with Ram capture < 1 second, with record to disk up to 2 seconds), as the Quicktime software has to set things up for the recording session. For this reason, it usually a good idea to grab a second or so of video before the actual footage you want to record and a bit afterwards as a trailer.
Once you've grabbed your video, you'll need to save it using Save or Save As… from the File menu. Selecting Save… (Command - S) works in this fashion.
1) If you have nothing selected, you'll be asked for a new file name for the movie. Clicking the Save button will result in the capture file being re-named to whatever you typed in and you don't have to wait for it to be saved, it's done. It essentially updates the capture movie with any changes you made (like deleting parts of it) which take far less time for it. However, there is no interleaving (ie mixing the sound & video for optimum playback) and does not actually remove the parts you clipped out. This means that if your captured clip is 200 megs in size, and you delete say 30 megs of it, the movie is still 200 megs in size, but for playback purposes quicktime will not display the parts you deleted.
2) If you have a portion (or all) of a movie selected ,that portion will be saved in a new file. If you have the "Post Compress with MJPEG" Digitizer preference checkbox checked, then it will be saved using MJPEG A - High Quality setting, which results in the Saved movie clip being reduced to about 25-20% of it's original size and with minimal loss in movie quality.
Selecting Save As… saves the entire movie to a new movie file, irregardless if you have portion selected. Post Compression is not applied for Save As.
Save… & Save As… for none Capture Movies
If you are doing simple cut/copy/paste/trim movie editing from a movie that was not just captured (ie it's not a "Cap#x" movie), Save… works in this fashion.
1) if you have nothing in the movie Selected, then Save… just saves the movie and updates any changes you made to the old movie file.
2) If you select a portion or all of the movie and then do a Save…, you will get a Save Selection as: dialog which allows you to save the portion you selected as a new movie.
Copying a Movie into a New Movie
If you want to copy a portion (or all) of a movie and create a new movie from it, you can use New Pasted Movie under the File Menu. Select (hilight) all or part of the movie you want, then select New Pasted Movie and a new movie will be created that contains your selection. This provides a shortcut to having to Create a new movie and then Paste stuff into it. Note that once you have created a New Pasted movie, you can continue to copy - paste other movies (or portions of them) into it to create a quick and dirty "Edit Cut" type movie.
If you decide to save the Pasted movie, the Save and Save As… commands under the file menu will be titled "Save Self Contained…" and "Save Reference…".
Save Self Contained… removes all external references and transfers the information from the original movie(s) into the new one your saving to. The Self Contained movie can get very large in a hurry and winds up duplicationg the video stored on your hard drive. But if your planning on deleting the original movie(s) you copied & pasted, then this is your only option.
Save Reference… creates a new movie file and puts a reference to the original movie(s) in the movie. The movie will be very small, but will not be playable unless the referenced movies in it are available (ie you'll need to mount or insert the CD / JAZZ / hard drive they reside on). But it does allow you to do a very quick and dirty Edit Cuts type movie for playback.
Grabbing a Single Frame of Video
To grab a single frame from the video window (ie it's playing in the Video Window), all you have to do it select the Snap Shot (Command - [) item from the Digitizer menu. The pict will be grabbed and saved to the Default Volume you specified for saving video clips (if you picked one in the Digitizer Preferences section) or in the same folder that MyVid Cap resides in (if you haven't picked a default volume). The name of the pict file will be like "101111 pict" and the number value is a time stamp. You can re-name the pict to whatever you want later. NOTE: Your current monitors color depth settings (256, thousands, millions) controls the color depth of the snap shot picture. So If your monitor is in millions of colors, the pict will be saved in millions of colors and if your in (ick) 256 colors, it's saved in 256 colors.
You can also grab a single frame from an Apple script and the "Take Picture" command. Please checkout "Grab Snap Shot script" for details on how to use it.
Digitizer Info
The Digitzer Info… item allows you to see information on what your video card hardware supports. I'm not going to describe what all the different items mean, but if your having a problem with digitizing video, we can use the information to possibly determine what the video card can or can't do. To send us a snap shot of the "Digitzer Info" dialog, simply type Command - Shift - 3 (or under MacOS 8, type Command - Shift - 4 and then draw a selection rectangle around the dialog to grab that portion) and then E-Mail use the pict.
Movie Info, Analyze and Graph Frame Rate
The Movie Info…, Analyze… and Graph Frame Rate… items under the Movie menu allows you to get statistics on an open movie.
Movie Info… gives you a very quick look at your movie for duration, data rates and file size of the video, audio and total movie. It will only be accurate for frame rates if the movie your getiting information on is not referencing other movies. If you need accurate frame rate information, then use Analyze.
Analyze… steps through every frame in a movie (which can be very slow for large movies or MPEG movies) and then gives you additional statistics, such as minimum/maximum frame duration. If you find Analyze… is taking to long, type command period and it will quit calculating the values.
The Average frame rate reported in Analyze… is the sum of all frame durations divided by the number of frames (this takes time, as "My Vid Cap" has to get each frame from disk, find out it's duration and then calculate the average). The Max - Min Dur: values are frames per second and you can use this to gauge how "regular" the capture was. If you have a portion of the movie selected, the information is reported for only that selected portion.
Graph Frame rate… analyzes your movie (or selected portion of a movie) and then creates a graph from it. The graph shows the number of frames that occur within a specified duration. You'd principally use it to look for dropped frames or clusters of dropped frames.
The vertical axis is the number of frames and the height of each red bar indicates the number of frames in that time category. The horizontal axis is in 1/600th of a second time values and has a maximum 60 time categories. So a graph time value of 20 is (20/600) 1/30th of a second (30 fps) and a value of 60 is 1/10th of a second duration (10 fps). The width of the vertical red bars will adjust depending on how many time increments are found (ie if there are 60 or greater time intervals, then each bar is 10 pixels wide - if there are 20 intervals, each bar will be 30 pixels wide).
If there is no variation of the frame rate for the movie (or selected portion of a movie), you will get an error message stating there is nothing to analyze and no graph will be created. Otherwise you'd just get a single vertical bar, which isn't useful or informative, so we don't show it.
Presenting Movies
Under the File Menu is the Present Movie… and Present Prefs… menu options, which are only available under QuickTime 2.1 or higher. Apple now has a neat function which hides the menubar and blanks the screen under quicktime 2.1+ and we decided to make use of it. It allows you to blank the screen, centers your movie and then play it back, so that you can record it to say a VCR or for your own viewing pleasure. To use it, first open a QuickTime movie, then click on the Movie menu and select an appropriate size (ie fill screen, double size, half size etc.) to play it back at. Next select Present Movie. The screen will go black, the menubar will dissappear and then in xxx seconds, the movie starts playing until you click the mouse button or the end of the movie is hit, which stops the presentation. HOWEVER, if you have a portion of a movie selected and then check the Play Selection Only item under the edit menu, then only the selected portion of the movie will be played when you use Present Movie.
Present Prefs… allows you to specify the delay in seconds before the movie begins playing (so you can hit the VCR record button), the delay after the movie finnishes playing (so you can hit the VCR stop button) and the HighQuality Checkbox, which tells Quicktime to play this movie at the highest possible quality there is (which may result in jerky playback for slower Macs).
