planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

The headlines on the East coast newspapers read something like: ‘California Coast ON FIRE’ & ‘SoCal Burns!’ You can imagine the 1.2 million phone calls this generated as opposite coast families call in a panic.

California is a big ass state. If you were in Malibu and drove to the city of San Diego - it’s about 150 miles. That’s a trip from Boston, MA to Bridgeport, CT. Orange County (where 1 major fire is burning) is only 200 square miles smaller then the state of Rhode Island. San Diego County (where several major fires are burning) is 20% smaller then Connecticut. San Bernardino County (I-15 fires and still in ‘So-Cal’) is as large as the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. That’s 20,000 square miles, or 12,800,000 acres. The so cal fires are roughly 200,000 acres burned so-far. Yes, that is a lot - but the whole coast is far from ‘ON FIRE!’

Contrary to this argument is the above picture that we took from the I-5 heading down into San Diego on Tuesday night. They shut the highway down shortly after to start a back-burn. Camp Pendleton is just miles of wild desert brush. Because no homes, property, or military personnel were in danger they just let this fire burn itself out. Here it certainly looked as if the coast was on fire. Three miles of it anyway.

I’m posting this mostly as a Public Service Announcement. Yesterday I spent several hours capturing all the DV video from a rally. I didn’t even look at the finished product, I just went on capturing 2 hours of video. After that was done I played the first clip. Keep in mind that the playback speed was fine. I preview it to a monitor as I capture it and it was normal speed.

The saved .avi (DV) clip however was too fast. The audio sounded like chipmunks in an RC car. I changed tapes and found it the same for stuff I had recorded months ago. Fine on playback - too fast after capture. So, let me state this again for those desperately seeking search words. When I captured Digital Video from my Sony Handycam in Windows Movie Maker, the video was too fast. One thing I noticed was that while capturing - the clock telling you how much time has been captured was counting up way too slow. The other thing I noticed was the clip was split by two horizontal lines on the screen (see arrows). When the scene would move fast, you could see the difference in the picture between the top, middle, and bottom of the screen.

I have done NOTHING to my PC lately and I sat dumbfounded as to why it would all of a sudden start doing this. I started an exhausted search on the web for: captured video too fast; DV video speed capture; windows movie maker capture too fast. Thankfully someone, somewhere mentioned LP vs. SP and how problems can occur with their use. I defragmented, I chkdsk’d, I reloaded DV drivers - with no luck. I also absolutely hate when people point to a ‘mysterious codec issue.’ No one had any answers as to why my captured video was too fast.

It was only after I started to poke at the camera itself as the culprit that I found the issue. When I turned on the camera yesterday it was telling me to set the time and date. This was an indication to me later that the settings had been lost. I record to 8mm tape in the car on an older Sony unit in LP, then play it in a newer “dedicated” 8mm TRV-460 to my computer. I was still thinking that the LP and SP change was the issue so I set the clock and set the machine to record in LP mode. It made no difference - - until I took THAT tape out and put another one in. I noticed that the picture was less grainy and those horizontal lines were gone. Sure enough, when I plugged the firewire cable in and captured a few seconds of video, I had fixed it.

If you do have to record in LP, make sure your player is also set to LP even when playing it back. After setting it, take out the tape and pop it back in. There is nothing wrong with your computer, please don’t load a codec pack - as this is RAW DV and has yet to be encoded. I hope that solves your issue.