Creating Digital Video movies with

WinTV-USB

Overview of Video Clip Capture

Live video which is digitized by the video digitizer (see “How WinTV USB works”) can be “captured” as a video sequence (or “video clip”) by using the WinTV Capture program. This program is provided in the WinTV Application and uses Microsoft’s WDM for Windows capability which is built into Windows 98 and 2000.

WinTV-Capture creates a file type called AVI (Audio/Video Interleaved) on your hard disk. This file contains digitized video and, optionally, audio.

WinTV USB gives high quality captured video by storing uncompressed digitized video in an AVI file. This compares with compression methods such as JPEG and MPEG, where some loss of video quality is accepted in order to reduce the amount of data stored. Uncompressed video capture creates high quality digital video movies, but requires optimized system performance to avoid lost video frames (called “dropped frames”.)

To create the best quality digital videos, use the following steps:

Compress/Edit, etc. by using the appropriate 3rd party software with these functions

Edit the raw video. Add special effects, cut, paste, etc. using one of the popular digital video editing programs such as Adobe Premiere, MGI VideoWave or U-Lead MediaStudio.

After editing the video, compress the video for the playback target. For example, if you are creating a video to be used in a multimedia presenta- tion, compress with either Intel’s Indeo or Supermac’s Cinepak. If you are creating a CD-Video, use MPEG compression to get up to 74 minutes of video on a CD-ROM.

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