Halloween > F.A.Q

How do I transfer still images to my PC if my camera doesn’t have a SD card slot?

If your camera doesn’t have an SD memory card slot you will not have the ability to directly transfer still images from the camera to the PC.  You can purchase a 3rd party video capture device. Visit your local retailer or do an online search for USB photo capture.

How do you transfer video from mini DV camcorder to PC?
Easiest way is to connect the camcorder to the PC via a fire wire cable, or if your computer has AV inputs, you can do that. You can use Microsoft Movie Maker which comes as a standard accessory on windows XP to capture your images and save them on your PC. If your computer only has USB ports, take out the tape and borrow a USB-capable camcorder to transfer video to your PC through the USB connection.

What hard drive space should I have when working with digital video (DV)?
The hard drive on your computer will need a lot of free space when you're working with video - as much as 12-14 gigabytes (GB) of space for every hour of footage you import. If you don't have that much space to spare, consider purchasing an external hard drive. Working with such large files means that you'll also need a powerful computer. A fast processor (CPU) and plenty of memory (RAM) will make it much easier to transfer and edit video.

What digital video software do you need for your DV equipment?
In conjunction with the hardware, you'll also need special software to capture, compress, edit or convert the video footage on your computer. The digital video software assists you with capturing the video from your video camera or VCR, and also allows you to cut/edit the footage or add fun special effects such as narration, transitions, menus and background music, and also convert the footage to kinds of other video/audio formats like MP4, MOV, WMV, MPG, FLV, MP3, AAC, etc. In some cases, digital video software may have come with your video capture card or device. If not, there are a number of free video editing programs, such as Windows Movie Maker, iMovie that can perform some of these functions. If you want to get fancy, then programs such as Adobe Premiere Elements, Ulead VideoStudio, Apple's Final Cut and Pinnacle Studio make it easy to get your movies with professional results. If you want to do video conversion for playing on your portable devices, and make simply editing functions like cropping, trimming, adding watermark, adjusting effect, replacing audio, you could use Pavtube’s video converter, HD video converter, for Mac user: Pavtube video converter for Mac, HD video converter for Mac.

How does digital video capture work in Final Cut Pro?
Traditionally, in Final Cut Pro you are supposed to log your tapes before capturing them. This means that you watch your tapes, and set in and out points of the data to capture. This has the advantage of minimizing the amount of disk space you use, but it's horribly time-consuming and very hard on your tape transport. Thanks to today's enormous disks, it's a lot easier to just use "Capture Now" to capture the entire tape. You can then split it into start/stop points automatically. Recent versions of Final Cut Pro have accommodated lazy people with automatic start-stop detection. Select it from the menu and your video is automatically chopped up into sub-segments which map to when you started and stopped your camera, based on time code.

How to load a my video from Final Cut Pro, Following are the steps:
1. Render any effects in your timeline. 2. Make sure your video is under 10 minutes (or it will get bounced). 3. Highlight your SEQUENCE in the BROWSER 4. The go to FILE...EXPORT...QUICKTIME CONVERSION... 5.Select MPEG-4...then Hit OPTIONS. 6. Select Current Frame Rate or (30 for NTSC) High Quality Compression bit rate or 1200 Kbs/Size 352X288. Click on the STREAMING TAB option & select yes for streaming). 7. Then hit SAVE. 8. Go to Youtube.com ...Click on the upper right side UPLOAD VIDEO (after you sign in) 9. The Name your clip (important-Google looks at this as a keyword), Select the MPEG-4 on your Drive. hit Upload.. 10. It takes a while...don't worry it will work.

Why my digital video (DV) can not be uploaded to YouTube?
Make sure your video is less than 10 minutes, smaller than 2GB in size, and in an acceptable YouTube format (FLV/F4V). So, the first thing you should do is to convert your DV to FLV/F4V. If you already have a video converter program, you just add the file to the program, and select FLV/F4V as output format and then convert. Last, you could upload now. If you don’t have, Pavtube Video Converter could help you convert the file with high quality.

How to transfer the DV, HDV, AVCHD video to the iPod; what do I need to do so that I can transfer the output files into my iPod?
The important tool you need is a video converter such as: Pavtube video converter to convert the video you shoot to iPod (.*mp4). After download the program, please connect your DV equipment to you PC; make sure your DV camera is ON and could be recognized by the computer. Then you could transfer the videos to your PC and import them to video converter, select the output format of iPod (.*mp4) and convert. Next it is a must to download iTune, please download it from www.apple.com. Afterwards, connect the iPod to computer, drag the converted files to iTune, and simultaneously transfer to iPod./p>

My iPod is a 5.5G one. So I wonder which profile is the best one for me.
The most important feature for 5.5G iPod is that it can support 640x480 resolutions. So you'd better select the profiles, named with "iPod Video2", whole default settings are in 640x480 and which will provide better output quality than other profiles.

How to compress my video to smaller size without losing the quality?
In order for your video to be easily watched over the Web or media mobile or easier to be edited, you need to compress the size of the video file by lowering the bitrate while using a suitable codec to compress and decompress the video. Pavtube Video Converter which is an extremely efficient video capturing and processing program. It can be used to compress an MJPEG AVI file (digital camera’s usually save in this format) to Divx/Xvid AVI video with MP3 audio and also compress other HDV, AVCHD videos. You just install the program, import the video and them select Divx/Xvid AVI format or other format and select smaller size, down-regulate the bitrate and framerate in the format “settings”, then click “Convert” to get the smaller video.

What is bit-rate?
We use the term bit rate when speaking of video or audio quality and file size. It defines how much physical space one second of audio or video takes in bits. The higher the bit rate the better the source quality and larger the file.
For video, smaller frame sizes and lower frame rates will mean that you can use a lower bit rate without losing any visible quality. The smaller number of smaller frames simply takes less information to describe.

What compressors provide the best quality AVI files?
Here are some compressors that are generally known to provide very good quality:
XviD MPEG-4 Video Codec
http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/
Xvid is an MPEG 4 video compressor. It is completely free of charge, and can be used to create AVI files compatible with the DivX compressor at no cost. Xvid compression produces small AVI files with extremely high video quality. But if you use Pavtube Video Converter, almost all the best compressors are included in this program to compress your big DV or HDV to small size with best quality

Which file format is the best?
The following table is what we recommend using each file format:
 

What is 16:9 and 4:3?
The proportion of horizontal versus vertical resolution. For instance, 4:3 means that a if a picture is 4" wide, it's going to be 3" tall. 16:9 means that a 16" wide picture requires 9" in height. You cannot convert a 4:3 image to 16:9 without either distortion or putting horizontal black space to the left and right of the image. I had ever seen a TV picture that was 4:3 stretched to 16:9 and it looked awfully bizarre.

How to split my video? And how to crop off the black edges and adjust the size of video play region?
These entire things could be done by downloading a program-Pavtube Video Converter. Please first add the file to this program, and then you will see the "Trim" function which in “Edit” item serves as a video splitter for you to get any time-length video clip. You can set the exact time-length of the episode by setting the "Start Time" and "End Time" or directly drag the slide bar to choose the position you want. Maybe you don’t like the black edges of your video, please select the "Crop" function next to “Trim” to crop off the black edge of your video and adjust the video region by dragging the dashed line around the video image.

How to remove interlaces of my video?
Interlacing is a technique developed in the early days of television to work around the limitations of the equipment available that time. The basic idea is that instead of broadcasting the whole video image 50 (or 60 in the NTSC standard) times per second to produce acceptable motion during playback, only half of the image - each even or each odd line - is transmitted in 1/50 of a second followed by the other half of the the next image in the next 1/50 second, then the first half of the third image in the next 1/50 second and so on. Conventional TV broadcasts still use that method, and lots of digital video cameras record interlaced video as well. When you shoot video with your DV camera, you will find many interlaces on the video when you playback. Don’t worry, you just use Pavtube Video Converter and import the video to it, select “Edit”, then click the “Effect”, you will see “deinterlacing”, and only need to check it, then the converted file will be good without interfaces.

I convert my DV to video formats but the video and audio never sync up. How to fix it?

For the problem about out of sync, there is mainly four factors to cause it. The following content is the detailed information: A: The video bit rate and frame rate are too high, and the audio bit rate is too low (also happened in the opposite situation). We suggest you to lower your video bit rate and frame rate, and higher the audio bit rate (or higher your video bit rate and frame rate and lower the audio bit rate in the opposite situation). B: Old codec, the old codec will cause problem of certain key frames.  You can update your codec version. C: Certain players (as mobile phone, MP4 player) have the limited ability to handle videos, or some players contain the different codec methods with the videos. This also will result in the video/audio out of sync. Change the player to have a try. D:   The video converter program you used, maybe the program is not advanced enough in this aspect, please try to use other programs: Pavtube products could promise to give you perfect video/audio sync based on its excellent technology.