Introduction

These pages detail some of my experiences in processing, editing and outputting camcorder footage. I am primarily interested in the output of the footage in the form of compressed MPEG2 video that can be stored on optical media, as a SuperVideoCD or DVD-R. I've also tried dabbling with video over the web, and these experiments are on the video streaming page.

I've recently updated my editing system to Windows XP (from (98SE). The discs are now formatted as NTFS rather than FAT32, which means that the 4Gb limit to file size has now gone. This makes video editing so much easier and many of the workarounds I've detailed here (necessary under Windows 98) can be left behind. For the time being I will leave this information available for people still using Windows 98, but if you are serious about video editing XP has to be the way to go!

I'm in the UK so I am working with PAL projects, at the budget end of the computer video editing spectrum. At the moment I'm using a AMD Thunderbird 700mhz based system, 384mb RAM, Gigabyte GA-71XE motherboard, Geoforce 256 video card, Pioneer A03 DVD-R drive, and two IDE hard drives (a 60GB boot, 80GB on the slave channel for project files). I've recently aquired a 1GHz Duron based system which helps out with MPEG encoding. My camcorder is a Sony DCR - TRC120E, coupled with an ADS pyro card for video capture.

One of the main features required for the home video editor when choosing a camcorder is that of digital video in, since this allows edited projects to be exported back to tape. Whilst my main focus is on finished projects on disc, the ability to create a master tape in DV is integral to my method of working. The rest of the world gets DV in as standard, but archaic tax legislation means that these features are often disabled on European models to save a few pounds on import duties. Thankfully companies such as www.Lynxdv.com provide a quick and simple way of returning full functionality to these camcorders.

Please use the menu at the base of the screen to navigate this site, if you would like to contact me on anything on these pages please email me on video@garethhorne.co.uk

last updated 17 June 2002