Inchoate Nuggets of Questionable Interest

I'm not as attractive as Janie Porche, and I can't say that I saved any solstice-proximate holiday, but since I got my Mac, I've been enjoying working with digital video.

The setup I have is a little peculiar, and given that I forget things, I'll document it here. If there's some non-me reader that gets some value out of the discussion, that's good, too.

Here's a few situations that come up, some more often than others:

• I want to archive an episode of Good Eats so that I can remind myself the little asides that Alton makes when he throws in the dash of kosher salt if and when I ever get inspired to make a roulade. Or whatever.
  
• I've just seen a movie on cable (ahem, satellite) that my folks would really enjoy seeing, too.
  
• I want to make a photomosaic of They Might Be Giants out of frames from Gigantic
  
• I have some friends that really would like to borrow one of my laserdisks, or they would, if they had a laserdisk player.
  

These essentially boil down to "I want to get data off my TiVo and onto a DVD-R". The last case will be left as an exercise for the reader, but as a hint, it's "I want to get data off my LaserDisk player and onto a DVD-R".

Over time, I've gone through a number of different technologies for acquiring still or moving image content into the digital domain, including an Intel card back in 1993 that struggled to keep up with realtime footage, even when downsampled to a low-res image size. More recently, I got a Dazzle video capture device that connected over USB2 to a desktop Windows PC. I think I was most frustrated with the software included with that device - the hardware seemed adequate.

These days, what I do is hook up my Sony Digital Video Camera Recorder (tm) between my video source (TiVo) and my digital consumer (the Mac in this example). The model of camera (in case you weren't paying attention at the top of this post) is a DCR-TRV39. It's got USB2, Firewire, and modem(!) connectivity, which mostly seems useful for sucking data off of recorded tapes. However, there's a feature documented on page 163 of my manual, titled "Capturing images from an analog video unit on a computer - Signal convert function". To set this up (in case you've lost your manual), turn on "A/V->DV OUT". You probably also want to remove the tape from the camcorder - sometimes it makes things a little easier.

I think that if I were using USB, I'd be able to do this next bit simpler, but I use Firewire for the superior video quality, and the software that I've used recognizes my Firewire-connected camcorder and proceeds to send all sorts of commands up the wire to it. When I want to start recording, the host computer says "hey, start rolling the tape so we can record". Which isn't what I'm trying to do in this situation. Some higher-end (less broken) software can actually turn this off, and perhaps I had to do this in order to get my configuration to work. I don't recall now exactly what I had to do, but it is possible.

So. We've got the camcorder hooked up via Firewire to the Mac. There's a 1/8" Stereo+Video socket on the camcorder, and I connect that up to the TiVo. TiVo also has SVideo out, and the camera has SVideo in. So when I can, I use that. Now, I know that I'm going from digital (TiVo) to analog (SVideo or RCA) back to digital (the camcorder), and perhaps the difference between the connections wouldn't be visible to me, but I've got the cable, I might as well use it.

That's all the necessary physical connections. Data flows from one device to the next to the next. Turn the camcorder on, launch iMovie, press "Import", press play on the TiVo box, and then everything's good to go. iMovie doesn't like to work with clips that are 10 minutes long, so it breaks them up. But don't worry about it - when you put them back together, it'll be fine. Or, if you're recording a commercial broadcast, you can stop the import during the commercials; that often yields clips that are more meaningful.

Once I've captured all the content I'm interested in, I grab the clips and assemble them on the timeline at the bottom of the screen. If I need to trim some stuff (remove commercials, get rid of TiVo user interface that got captured before or after the show), that's easy enough - make sure to tweak the "Zoom" slider and not the "Rabbit/Turtle" slider to be able to make good cuts.

Here's where there are a few options - if I'm going to create a collection of shows on one DVD, I export ("share") the movie as a DV movie at high quality. (Look under the Quicktime tab.)

If I'm going to make a DVD with a single movie on it, I might feel like adding chapters within iMovie. That's done from the iDVD button (lower right corner of the screen) which allows you to place chapter markers. Then, when you're done, you can export directly to iDVD (saves you a step of exporting/sharing explicitly).

I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable with iDVD yet - I suspect that it's more useful than I've plumbed; maybe I've only found the scissors and corkscrew on the metaphorical swiss army knife. Just today I figured out which slider I needed to play with if some of my menus had animating video buttons while others had still frames (it's on the settings tab, near the top, make sure the duration of the loop isn't set to 0:00).

So far, I'm using single-layer DVD technology. I'm waiting until Dual Layer DVD-Rs (plus? minus? I don't think I care) drop below $5 a pop. Even better would be if printable dual layer DVDs were easily available.

Anyway, single layer means an hour at the "optimize for speed" setting, or around 2 hours in the "optimize for space". As I suggested above, I don't get worked up about video artifacts too much, and I'm happy letting the machine chew on a movie overnight. I've turned off the feature where iDVD starts encoding before you hit "Burn"- I forget if that was something I did as part of diagnosing another problem, but I thought I had some problem with it.

One thing I'd like to be able to do - and maybe it's possible - is be able to save the iDVD and iMovie projects in some way onto the DVD as data so that I can stick the burned DVD into the drive and easily duplicate the disk I've made. Let's say I made a disk of wedding movies, and after burning 20 copies, I might think that it's OK to get rid of the project data. Until such time as I recall that Aunt Lydia didn't get a copy. (Nevermind the fact that Lydia doesn't have a DVD player. Maybe we'll get her one for Christmas.) It'd be nice to churn out another DVD, picking up pretty much where I left off after the 20th copy in the first print run.

So, that's the ramble-laden process. The one bit that could afford the most speedup is the fact that I'm capturing at realtime, which means that the 20 episodes of Good Eats that are taking up my TiVo space aren't getting ripped this afternoon.

But I'm able to show my friends one of my favorite movies, and until there's a Project Gutenberg for obscure film, the above-described mess of cables will do the trick.