[LazyWeb] Any A/V monkeys in the hizzy?

[prog]

Yesterday I tried to record a session of computer use onto my camcorder via S-Video, and it looked like utter crap; it's blurry, like it was forced through some arbitrary resolution reduction. During full-screen playback in iMovie, on-screen text is just this side of illegible.

Lacking DVD+Rs to experiment with, I haven't tried viewing this on my TV yet; maybe it will look fine there. (Which is to say, as good as it can on low-res TV.) But I'm not hopeful; the quality loss is really surprising to me, and I'm not sure where or why it's happening.

My process: After connecting the camera to my Mac (with an S-Video cable and an audio dubbing cable), I had it recognize the camera as another display device, and then mirror its video output to both it and my usual monitor. This reduced the monitor's resolution to that of the camcorder's LCD panel (or perhaps the camcorder itself), but it was still more than enough for the game I wanted to record to look good.

What am I doing wrong? Am I doing something wrong?

Comments

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

If your machine is handling video compression in software, then there's a chance it isn't able to keep up with the video stream, and is doing a crapsome job as a result. Capture devices that handle video compression onboard rarely display this problem.

Hmmm.

[kyroraz.livejournal.com]

It seems that all my s-video from my powerbook is all blurry. The only time it isn't is when I am working with big things like StepMania.

Re: Hmmm.

[daerr.livejournal.com]

When have you used s-video? I didn't know you had access to a TV that supported it… (Personally I've only ever used s-video as an input to my PC's video capture card and it's always WAY better then RCA.)

[daerr.livejournal.com]

What you want is: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

It can do screen capture directly to a mov (including synchronized audio).

[prog.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure. I want to be able to capture a lot of video footage and then edit it down later... the cost in HD space of raw source-to-disk capture is gonna be prohibitive in most cases (versus source-to-DV tape).