Video Capture

This page is under construction. It is for the Vision Group at the University of Leeds and their associates. It refers specifically to the DELL capture machine.

To use Adobe Premiere, you'll need to logon as admin.

Using Adobe Premiere

Good Luck. You'll need it. I'd check:

Camera plugged in to firewire port on machine at the back of the box, before starting Adobe Premiere
Blue Matrox screen flashes up at some point during startup.
There's lots (20GB+) of empty space on the D: drive
The D: drive is a SCRATCH DISK and is named as this. (Scratch disk = temporary storage of data and is not for permanent storage. Don't be upset if it disappears)

Making a DVD for a home DVD player

In Adobe Premiere, capture and edit as usual. Choose File > Export Timeline > Movie then click the settings button. In General, from the File Type list, select Matrox RT. Select the Video Menu, and from the Compressor list choose Matrox MPEG-2 IBP (export only). Press the Configure button and make sure it is DVD-compliant, other settings can also be chosen. Click OK. This mpeg-encoding seems to take 4 times the length of time of the movie, for high quality (8MB/s) full frame video. So, some time later, close once it's finished saving, close Adobe.

Open DVD-it!. Start a new DVD project - MPEG2 (DVD Compliant). The built in help is useful. Open it, and follow it through. It is easy to make menus, which link to chapters in the movies. Make sure you preview the DVD, and it does as you expect. Then Build it to DVD. The white pioneer DVD drive will burn DVD-R's. 3GB should take around 45minutes. Then you'll have a DVD that you can play at home.

Cheap DVD-R's are rubbish. I've failed to write to a batch from Jessops (white - BEST - DVD-R). I have written to a Bulkpaq (orange) DVD-R and also Imation (silver) DVD-R. ISS Sales have the latter for 75p each in a case.

High-Res Monitor

The high-resolution monitor is set up so that you can change between high and low res mode. (cslin176).

CTRL-ALT-F1           switch to a text terminal
    "chres lo"        set X to use 1280x1024
or  "chres hi"        set X to use tiny pixels
CTRL-ALT-F7           go back to X (and close everything)
CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE    restart X

Matlab

By default, the lab machines point at the Classroom license, which is just Matlab and the PDE toolbox. To use the Research license from a lab machine, set LM_LICENSE_FILE before running matlab, eg:

                                                                                                            
setenv LM_LICENSE_FILE /usr/local/matlab/etc/research_license.dat
                                                                                                            
matlab

Matlab Compiler

It is useful to set some environment variables. I source an ~/.mcc_rc file containing:

export MCRROOT=/usr/local/matlab
 
export MATLABROOT=/usr/local/matlab
 
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MATLABROOT/sys/opengl/lib/glnx86:$MATLABROOT/bin/glnx86:$MATLABROOT/sys/os/glnx86/:$MATLABROOT/sys/java/jre/glnx86/jre1.4.2/lib/i386/client/:$MATLABROOT/sys/java/jre/glnx86/jre1.4.2/lib/i386/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
                                                                             
export XAPPLRESDIR=/usr/local/matlab/X11/app-defaults

Any more tips?

Let me know if you have anything to add to this page. - chrisn

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