On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 03:48:42PM +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote: > > Dear Debianists, thanks for all the useful comments on video editing etc. > I do have a few other questions that I have accumulated after investigating > this a little further. I have nosing into the various different kinds of > camcorders that are about these days. There seems to be quite a few > different types. From what I could see it looked as though getting one > with a hard drive on it might be the way forward rather than a tape or DVD. > Your comments on this choice would be appreciated. > > Also getting a camera with a large lens generally seems to be helpful for a > number of reasons including motion and light sensitivity.
Remember that with any camera, the camer's job is to deal with the image the lens gives it. A fantastic camera and a poor lens gives a poor image; a fantastic lens and a poor camera gives a less-poor image. Pay the money for the good lens; I don't know of any manufacturer that puts a poor camera behind a top-notch lens. > How much better is the performance with the proprietary driver relative to > the free nv driver that comes with Debian Etch? There is a recipe in the > Debian docs telling you how to install the nonfree driver. > For me with an nVidia GE7300GT, its night and day. For my test, I used _The_Sound_of_Music_ 40th anniversary DVD. Opening scenes, nuns in chapel, candle flames against a dark background, facial expression, lines on old women's faces. Intergraph 21" CRT, 1600 x 1200 @ 85 Hz. VLC with deinterlace smoothing. Full screen mode which means system has to take image from DVD at 1024 x 768, deinterlace it, blend the two images to create an intermediate image, and expand it to 1600 x 1200 and interpolate. With nv driver, the candle flames were ragged and showed less gradation of colour, the lines on faces were blurred, there was motion artifact, and the processor (Athlon 3800+) was busy with lots of memory used. With the nVidia driver, the image was stunning, the processor was mostly idle and memory wasn't touched for it. In short, the difference was night and day. I don't do any recompile; I just use the pre-packaged debian nvidia kernel package that matches my standard kernel. Both have meta packages so they get updated together. I don't like that its a propriatary driver but I understand. I wish that all video cards would have a standard programming interface and the makers would do everything in hardware. Instead, the makers like to do things in software (its cheaper) even when its telling the hardware what to do. In the process, they don't want to give away any secrets. Some hard drives are better than others yet they all talk a common language (PATA, SATA, SCSI, whatever). Hard drive makers don't make you load a kernel module to access special features of their drives. Would that video was the same. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
