Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Last month, one of my brother’s sent me a DVD in the mail that contained video of us from the mid-80’s. Apparently the video had been stored on a camera and just never removed. This retrospective got me thinking about how popular Youtube channels like The 8-Bit Guy and Techmoan have become recently. It also got me thinking about all the video I have stored on MiniDV tapes that I never processed. Nine years ago, I recorded a lot of video using a Panasonic PV GS-80 camcorder. This inexpensive camcorder featured image-stabilization, 16:9 video, and relatively good quality for the price point at the time. I posted a number of videos from “Ontario Linux Fest” on archive.org, but I recorded so much that I simply didn’t get around to importing everything. The last time I was transferring the MiniDV DV tapes to digital format, I remember running into issues with KINO and pulseaudio. Both audio and video played back at super high speed. KINO was a great digital video editor capable of importing video from IEEE1394 sources like our Panasonic camcorder. IEEE1394 is the standard most often called Firewire. Firewire is actually Apple’s implementation of the IEEE1394 standard. Sony calls their IEEE1394 implementation i.LINK, and Texas Instruments called theirs Lynx. What I loved about KINO was that it gave complete control over the camera from the user interface. Unfortunately, as new video editors started coming out, KINO was abandoned. This is about when I stopped importing DV from the MiniDV tapes.
Le mois dernier, un de mes frères m'a envoyé par la poste un DVD qui contenait des vidéos familiales des années 1980. Apparemment, le film a été stocké dans une caméra sans jamais être enlevé. Ces souvenirs m'ont fait penser à la grande popularité récente des chaînes YouTube comme The 8-Bit Guy et Techmoan. Cela m'a également fait penser à toute la vidéo que j'avais stockée sur des bandes MiniDV, sans jamais les traiter.
Il y a neuf ans, j'ai enregistré beaucoup de vidéo avec un caméscope Panasonic PV GS-80. Ce caméscope, qui ne coûtait pas cher, avait la stabilisation de l'image, la vidéo 16:9 et une qualité relativement bonne pour les prix à l'époque. J'ai posté de nombreuses vidéos de l'Ontario Linux Fest sur archive.org, mais j'avais enregistré tant de choses que je n'ai tout simplement pas pris le temps de tout importer.
La dernière fois que je transférais de la DV des bandes MiniDV vers un format numérique, j'avais des problèmes avec KINO et pulseaudio. L'audio et la vidéo, tous deux, se lisaient à une vitesse extrêmement rapide. KINO était un éditeur de vidéo numérique génial qui pouvait importer de la vidéo à partir de sources IEEE1394 comme le caméscope Panasonic. IEEE1394 est le standard appelé le plus souvent Firewir, mais Fireware est en fait l'implémentation d'Apple du standard IEEE1394. Sony appelle son implémentation de IEEE1394 i.LINK et Texas Instruments appelle la sienne Lynx. Ce que j'aimais vraiment dans KINO, c'était que son interface utilisateur avait le contrôle complet sur la caméra. malheureusement, avec la sortie de nouveaux éditeurs de vidéo, KINO fut abandonné et c'était à ce moment-là, environ, que j'ai cessé d'importé de la DV des bandes MiniDV.
Inspired by my brother’s DVD, and all the retro video of late, I decided to hook the camera up to an HP 6710 core 2 duo laptop running Linux Mint Cinnamon 18. Back when I used to import DV, I always had to issue modprobe commands to get IEEE1394 working. I checked out some of the Ubuntu pages concerning Firewire and got mixed ideas. Some of the documentation seemed to indicate that I might need to blacklist items, and run modprobe, while other documentation seemed to indicate that things would just work. I installed KINO and the command-line IEEE1394 importing program dvgrab. Lo and behold, when I turned the camera on and went into the Kino Preferences > IEEE 1394 tab, the camera was detected! I got even more excited when I clicked the Capture button and KINO started importing the video as flawlessly as it originally did. Sadly, my excitement wasn’t long lived. After it started importing the fourth clip, KINO froze. Linux Mint was still responsive so I opened a terminal and checked the file size a couple of times. Even though KINO was frozen, the back end dvgrab program was still importing video, I could tell by running ls and watching the file size change over time. When the import finished, KINO stayed frozen, but I had several more .dv files.
Since I knew dvgrab could import video without issue, I used it to import DV from several other tapes. KINO defaults to the name capture###.dv (this can be changed in KINO), whereas dvgrab uses the name dvgrab-###.dv if you don’t specify a filename to capture to. As with any command-line program, dvgrab can take a number of different switches to change the behaviour of the capture. The -t switch, for example, puts the timecode at the end of the capture name so you end up with something like dvgrab-2009.09.04_22-14-52.dv. The timecode is the date and time the video was recorded. So, in the previous example, the video was recorded on September 4th, 2009 at 22:14:52 or 10:14 (and 52 seconds) in the evening.
Changing the name dvgrab records to is as simple as specifying the name at the end of dvgrab. For example:
dvgrab mymovie-
Results in files: mymove-001, mymovie-002, mymovie-003, etc.
There are plenty of video editors available for Linux: Openshot, Kdenlive, Pitivi, Avidemux, and Shotcut. Openshot, Pitivi, Avidemux and Shotcut don’t appear to support IEEE1394 capture. Kdenlive is suppose to support IEEE1394 capture, but when I tried it, I couldn’t get Kdenlive to recognize our camera (KINO and dvgrab do). I looked at LightWorks, but it requires an account, and wouldn’t work on the Core 2 Duo-based notebook.
Since my desktop (an A8-5600K APU-based system with 16GB of RAM) is a lot more powerful than the Core 2 Duo notebook, it makes sense that I do all the editing on the desktop. My workflow is a bit painful, import the video on the Core 2 Duo laptop using the command-line dvgrab, and transfer the video via SSH to the desktop for editing. We have a gigabit network running throughout our flat so it’s much more efficient than trying to back up to a USB 2.0 external drive (the desktop is USB 3.0, but the laptop is still 2.0).
Openshot has been my video editor of choice in the past, it works well with .dv files, is easy to use, supports effects like green/blue screen, and is stable. (That’s Jeremy Allison in the screenshot/video giving a talk at Ontario Linux Fest 2008 entitled Livin’ La Vida Linux)
I admit this isn’t a very efficient process, but it works, and it puts an old machine (the Core 2 Duo laptop) to good use. I’ll probably revise the process in the future by putting an PCIe IEEE1394 400 card in the desktop so I can do all the importing and editing in one machine. With approximately 30 more MiniDV tapes to import, it’s a big project.
Next month, I’ll have an update on how the video turned out. For an example of the video I imported back in 2007 to 2009, just search for “Charles McColm” on archive.org. I’ve posted several videos taken with the Panasonic PV-GS80. Now that the editors have improved and sites like archive.org and Youtube are allowing higher quality content I believe the video should be a bit better.