video for web settings

I went to the Auckland Hip Hop Summit on Saturday afternoon and caught some of the b-boying / breakdancing DISRUPT THE FLOOR heats and semis. The finals were held that night but I didn't make along. The Hip Hop Summit website will have the results. I took some video and am trying to convert it so I can upload to archive.org. What a challenge this is proving to be! The camera records direct to DVD which is great for previewing directly on my pc (or dvd player - though I don't have one here in Auckland), but the software that it comes with doesn't provide much in the way of conversion utilities. :( I have some software called MGI VideoWave which I've had for a while - since buying my Belkin usb/rca converter I think. It works ok - it's like a mini- Premiere package with a basic interface. But it doesn't open mpeg2 files or DVD .vob files directly.. So, to use this method, I need to connect the video camera to the Belkin video input and capture the vide and audio. Now, the camera does AC3 audio inherantly which sounds great on the DVD, but pretty crap once it's been recaptured - especially since the input on the level meter is stuck at 100% so it's really high level. I can capture the video this way, save as .avi file, then open in Quicktime and convert to .mov but quicktime is dropping the audio altogether!

The other method I can use, is to use quicktime to open the .vob files on the DVD, but this only seems to open the first chapter of the movie so I only get a short video not the complete video. It was a drama to even get this to work as well. I'd previously purchased the quicktime mpeg2 option but have since upgraded my version of quicktime (I think when I upgraded my iTunes) and somehow the mpeg2 option was lost as I couldn't even open .mpg files in quicktime at all. Since the cost is pretty low (+ I've lost the original install file for the mpeg2 option), I purchased it again, and at least now I can open .mpg files and the .vob files in quicktime even though the results are not perfect. I tried opening mpeg files and saving as .mov but I lost the audio again!

I also tried saving the encoded movies as .asf files but this made the files twice the size which doesn't help for the web now does it!

The quest continues...

I think it's time to read through some of the tips at node101 and see what the videobloggers would do.

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