So today, I tried to make good on the errors that I committed yesterday. The big difference today-no rush. I check the schedule to see what times (just in case) the program will be on. Next, I located any files that remained from the previous night recording and removed them (approximately 4.2 gigabytes) to free up space on the hard drive. I decided that rather than playing around with the auto record, I would begin a manual recording about a half-an-hour before the program scheduled to start. So I was able to do my exciting house work, like cleaning the vacuum cleaner’s filters, changing the kitty litter, and walking the dog. I managed to squeeze in playing Mass Effect, stopping before the ‘Boss Battle’ at the end that level. Then I can start the DLC (downloadable content) that I purchased the day before.
At 5:30 pm I began the recording. Two hours later I went back up and, to my great relief, the program was recorded. I went back to clean up after dinner (house work), before I began the conversion to an format to edit. Now the application that is supplied with the Elgato hardware has some simple editing capabilities, which I used to pare down the two hour recording to select the desired documentary. The tricky part happens after the clip is ready, what file format will I save it as? This application has around 15 video file formats. Some are particular to Apple software (e.g. iMovies), some handheld devices (e.g. PlayStation Portable), and video editing software (e.g. Adobe Premiere). I was going to work in Apple’s Final Cut.
The formats that would be tested are Quicktime Movie (.mov) format and the Mpeg4 (.mp4) format.
I started with the Mpeg format in the ‘File’ menu through the ‘Export’ item, then found the Mpeg 4 format in the list of formats. Now, a point of information, Jpegs and Mpegs are ‘loosy’ file format. There is a compression factor involved in the saving of the file (for an explanation Google search ‘lossy jpeg mpeg’). In essence, an algorithm is used to squeeze out redundant information, and compress the size of the file. The eyetv file for the two hour show was about 5 gigabytes, after the compression the file was about 180 megabytes, a big difference. But upon playing it back, I (and you) could see the loss of surface detail, especially on the face. It would be okay if you were going to play it at a reduced size on a computer monitor, but not on a television monitor. So that file format was out. I could have tweaked it a bit in the ‘Options’ offered when I was saving the file, but it would still show some image degradation. Well that left the Quicktime format (.mov). There is compression here, but the 5.4 gigabyte file was pared down to about 2.4 gigabytes. I think some this is done by reducing the number of frames. The smoothness is maintained, so you don’t really notice it. The sharpness of the image, even on the TV monitor, remains. So that is the way I went for the documentary. (Just a note, it took about an hour to convert the eyetv clip into the .mp4 file, and three and half hours for the .mov. That was a total of 4 and a half hours to create the two formatted clips for editing.)
Next step is the actual editing and burning of a DVD using iMovie and iDVD. That is for tomorrow and maybe the weekend. I hope to get the DVD to my relative early next week.
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