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Camcorder Confusion

S

starhawk

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 4, 2004
Messages
8,908
Hey, ya'll... took my first video today, and I'm a little perplexed.

Camera is a DXG-565V. Got it on sale at Kohl's for somewhere around $50, a year or two ago. Never used it till today. If you want to laugh, that's fine, but the other camcorder I have is a 1980s (at the latest) Sony Handicam that is best carried by something at least as large and powerful as a C-130 ;) Not kidding, it's big enough to record directly onto a regular VHS tape.

OK, moving on. So I take my SD card outta the camera, stick it in my computer, and the file I'm staring at is called MPEG0001.ASF. If anyone walked up to me on the street and asked me what "asf" was, I'd say someone in a chatroom missed the "L" key on the last letter there ;)

What the CRAP is ASF and how do I make it into something, ya know, useful? (AVI would be a good example of "useful".)
 
Looked at Wiki and promptly decided I was better off posting here -- sorry but I need a shovel and a strong back to get through that kinda jargon!

Thanks for the converter link, I'll post results in a little while.
 
Conversion worked fine... but apparently I need more than a little practice taking video. Looks remarkably horrible.

Trying to do a sort of manual video-capture of a booting laptop screen, and I know my lighting sucks. Yes I have a tripod (dinky little lump o' plastic from eBay) and I do know how to use that.

Tips?
 
Oh, right... to be a little more specific... video was not jerky, but it was darker than the ass end of a tomb, all kinds of blurry, and what little color actually bothered to appear in the video was not the color my eyes were giving me.

I do believe that there MIGHT be two or three videos on all of YouTube which have worse quality issues of this sort.
 
Sounds to me like the ASF file should play natively in windows media player. Does it still look horrible then? Just trying to rule out something going wrong during the conversion.

For better quality. Flip the switch to macro mode so it'll hopefully focus better. According to the manual you can have your subject as close as 15-16cm. Don't zoom at all - it only has digital zoom so it'll just enlarge the video pixels. Under movie options choose a quality of "fine". Also under the movie options choose the D1 resolution - this is the highest 720x480 resolution.
 
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starhawk said:
Oh, right... to be a little more specific... video was not jerky, but it was darker than the ass end of a tomb, all kinds of blurry, and what little color actually bothered to appear in the video was not the color my eyes were giving me.

I do believe that there MIGHT be two or three videos on all of YouTube which have worse quality issues of this sort.
Click to expand...

The laptop screen will look really bright to the camera. Something similar to taking pictures of snow, or a white sky may be happening and it is trying to make it a darker value. In the Movie Options screen, under the EV Compensation, try +1 EV or +2 to max it fully this should make the video brighter.
 
OK, here's what I got...

- was already set to D1 res
- got the ev comp set to -02
- flipped the little red switch on the side from "flower" to "mountain" dunno if that's the macro thing you were talking about

You can tell how much experience I have with this :rolleyes: BTW, there's something called "white balance" that I can fiddle with -- options are "auto", "sunny", "cloudy", "tungsten", and "fluorescent". Current setting is "cloudy". Should I fiddle with that as well?

EDIT: Oh damn, where are my manners?! I really do appreciate you taking the time to look up the manual and all, that's way more than I was expecting!
 
-2 ev will make the video darker.
+2 will make it lighter.

Take a short clip with both, and you should see the difference in the little playback LCD. +2 may be too extreme, try 1 if so.

The flower is the macro setting. So you probably want it on that.

[Strike=Option]Also make sure to half press the shutter then click it down all the way, to give it time to focus like with a normal camera.[/s]

Edit: Focusing might be two much to ask from the camera. Looking at the manual closer, it looks to be fixed focus. So you have the macro mode which is 15-16cm is the area in focus, then you have mountain which is 1.5m to infiniti.
 
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Haha, apparently I can't read. BTW, why is flower "macro"? I thought macro = far away stuff getting closer...?

Sorry if I'm being a total dumbass here *shrug* guess we all start somewhere, right?

EDIT: also, what about that "white balance" thing?
 
Macro is for taking pictures of objects that are close to the camera. You'll hear it associated with taking pictures of flowers that fill the whole picture, or bugs. Some cheaper autofocus digital cameras you have to put it on the macro setting to take pictures of anything closer than 4-5 feet - this is an issue because a lot of folks don't know this so you end up with blurry portrait shots.

The mountain symbolizes getting a wide scene of stuff in the frame. Like landscapes, a room, a backyard. This cheap camera it means having everything from 1.5m to infiniti in focus.

White balance is related to the color of light. Incandescents are yellower, fluorescents are cooler white normally. http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm http://berkelphoto.com/2010/12/16/what-is-white-balance/ If the auto whitebalance setting looks off when you are filming the laptop screen, I'd first try the fluorescent setting.

This really isn't the best video camera, but I'm sure you know that. I think the settings will make sense once you take some video clips. Walk around the house with it on the mountain setting and just film stuff. When you review it on the computer you'll be able to see the strenghts and weeknesses and also how close you can get to things. Try the macro flower setting also, and it should be very apparent it is just for objects that are close to the camera.

My uncle has a video camera similar to this one, but it has even less settings. So I think you did good.:D

Have a youtube account? I think you can upload ASF videos to there.
 
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I do have a youtube account, but I'm most certainly going to wait until I'm very good at this to upload pix. Sorry, folks, had enough BS from the kids in high school ;) I've seen the comments on that site, they are not kind to the poor of video-making.

As for "best video camera", well, everything is very relative. Best in my house? By quite a bit. Best in the world? Not even close to on the list.
 
Tilting the laptop screen forward fixed the color issue but I'm not getting the entire screen b/c of how close the camcorder is. Can I pull it farther away without losing the "I can haz color nao" part of it?

EDIT: d'oh. screen to lens distance is ~10.5".
 
What is your end goal for the video of the monitor? What are you wanting to show people? Do they need to be able to read the text?

720x480 is less then the resolution of your screen. You'll either need to put up with the text not being perfectly clear, or move the camera in closer.
 
Readable text would be a nice bonus but not entirely necessary.

Video is of my Dell Latitude CPi booting a version of Linux from CD. The process is rather a bit different from that of most Linux distros, so I want people to know what it looks like. Seeing the whole screen is rather a must.

Not to brag or anything, but the CPi boots in about 1min 30sec! Puppy Linux (specifically TurboPup) is just plain awesome...
 
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