Playing around with my new webcam setup

  1. HonketyHank
    HonketyHank
    Here is a sample video of me reading from a tabledit screen as I do a practice runthrough of Ricketts Hornpipe. (I will redo it for the TOM thread when I have learned how to play it.) I got the new higher-resolution webcam because I wanted to be able to blow up portions of the video without introducing big blocky pixels. So this video is produced from one camera, one raw video file.


    https://youtu.be/g5oC6h8h-DU

    If you watch this directly from the youtube site you can blow it up to full screen.

    The blowups are not as sharp as I would like but I think they are pretty good. To get better resolution, I would need to move up to professional grade equipment. If I had that kind of cash burning a hole in my pocket, I'd rather spend it on something like a REALLY nice mandolin.

    The raw video file is produced by that OBS software I mentioned. The settings I used are pretty basic -- the software is capable of producing much higher quality but my hardware is not (neither the camera nor my computer).

    I then loaded the raw video into Power Director and did all the manipulations to get the woodgrain background, blowups, etc.

    I would emphasize that you can make great videos by just pointing your smartphone at yourself and hitting "record". I just enjoy the technical challenge of jumping into this kind of stuff and seeing where it leads me.

    One other geeky kind of observation. My computer has an Intel i5-8600 processor, 48 GB of RM, a couple of solid state drives, and an AMD Radeon RX 560 display adapter. Not the latest, but pretty powerful. I was surprised at how long and hard it cranked rendering the final video in 1080p resolution.

    Point and shoot videos, on the other hand, don't need much at all in the way of computing power.
  2. Sue Rieter
    Sue Rieter
    Very cool. You mentioned the output is 1080p - what was the resolution of the raw file? Also, I see the minor pixelation in the blowups (I've got a 4K screen on my laptop), but I also wonder if precise focus is a factor. Tell us about Power Director....
  3. NDO
    NDO
    When using my iPhone to record video the sound keeps cutting out as if it’s trying to automatically reduce gain on loud sounds, so I have to do all my video using a GoPro. The sound on it seems surprisingly good, but it records in really high resolution that uses a lot of storage (2GB for every 12 minutes). I convert it to 480p for processing and uploading.
  4. HonketyHank
    HonketyHank
    The webcam resolution is 4k, which means different things to different cameras and monitors, but in this case is 3840x2160. The blowups are definitely not sharp and it is at least partly due to the beginning of pixelation, possibly also imprecise focus. The webcam is autofocus, which I don't much like, in part because it is hard to know exactly what it is focusing on. I can turn it off but the manual focus is even more difficult to work with. I do notice that the autofocus on the Brio is better than on the C920 - it is much less noticeable when it decides to re-seek for a sharper image.

    Power Director is by Cyberlink Software. You can google them up and get an idea of what-all it can do. I don't know if they still sell a standalone version of it. I have a yearly subscription but I am thinking of looking around at maybe some opensource software. I find Power Director to be way more than I want or need in most respects, but it has some capabilities that I do like. I used Windows movie maker for a year or two way back when we started the TOM threads. That worked pretty nicely. I am not sure if Microsoft still has Movie Maker. When I got it, I had to dig around pretty hard to find it. It was a Windows 7 program that Microsoft just decided not to port up to Windows 10. But it worked ok for me in Windows 10.
  5. Sue Rieter
    Sue Rieter
    I like open source programs generally. I use Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and a small handful of others - I try to stay away from Microsoft when I can.
    We do have a copy of Premier Elements 20 (an Adobe product), but it's a head scratcher and there's not alot of documentation available for it. I'd be interested in what you come up with for open source.
  6. HonketyHank
    HonketyHank
    Update

    I am not happy so far with what I can do recording in 4k. I am coming closer to the conclusion that I just don't have the horsepower in my computer. My computer does pretty well with 1080p resolution, but 4k recording requires the processing of at least 3 times the amount of data on the fly. For my several years old i5 processor, this means I have to crank up the compression of the file as it is recorded (resulting in noticeable quality loss) or let the processor get overwhelmed and just skip ahead to try to catch back up (resulting in near-to-complete-garbage).

    I do like the Logitech Brio webcam, even in 1080p. The C920 is a very good webcam but the Brio has a better lens.

    Right now, I am working on convincing myself that it is time to upgrade my computer. Computers are a bit like Corvettes - you can get the fastest one but pretty soon you'll want one that is faster.
  7. bbcee
    bbcee
    Another idea before upgrading your computer is to look into a more powerful graphics card and whether OBS/Power Director can take advantage of the GPU. Hey, if it works for bitcoin mining, it must work for video editing!
  8. HonketyHank
    HonketyHank
    After a bit of discouragement yesterday, I thought about everything and decided it was quite possible that I was misunderstanding what some of the settings in OBS do. So I pretty much started over after seeing a couple of notes in the help wiki: "For most applications, the default settings in the 'simple' tab should work quite well". So I set everything to the software defaults and started over. Things are looking a lot better.

    Thanks for the tip on GPU encoding. That did help.
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