[Fwd: Re: [linux-audio-user] [OT?] camcorder mic] - Linux-audio-user

21 Mar 2006

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Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 11:15:03 -0500
From: Gene Heskett &lt;gene.heskett(a)verizon.net&gt;
Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] [OT?] camcorder mic
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To: Eric Dantan Rzewnicki &lt;eric(a)zhevny.com&gt;
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On Tuesday 21 March 2006 06:46, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
...
 Hi Gene,

Gene Heskett wrote:
  On Monday 20 March 2006 18:28, Eric Dantan
Rzewnicki wrote:
 I'm shopping for new camcorder and am
considering getting a
 "shotgun" mic for it. I wondered if anyone here has any experience
 with these. I'm looking at the Rode VideoMic:
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/VideoMic/ 
 That looks A: like a pretty decent mic for the bucks, but be aware
 that the AUD vs USD will eat a lot of that so-called discount.
 And B: an odd shock mount which leads me to ask how fragile in might
 be in the field as it sure looks top heavy and the photo doesn't
 seem to show much bracing in the roll direction. 
The reviews I've read say that it's actually fairly light since it's
made of ABS instead of metal, so it's not as top heavy as it looks,
apparantly.

  I like that spl rating of 131 db though, you are
not going to be
 able to overload that mic without wearing some 30db gun muffs like I
 use at the target range.

 I've pretty much settled on the Panasonic
PV-GS300 camcorder. Any
experiences or opinions on that are also welcome. 
 No experience there, other than to comment that I have a Sony
 TRV-460 digital hi8 that I'm plumb in love with.  I shot a wedding
 with it last spring that came out very well.  It has a firewire port
 so I can upload raw video in real time, but that needs lots of free
 space on your hard 
Raw video, with decent audio quality, in real time via ieee1394 is the
main thing I'm after. Not necessarily going direct to disk, though.
 The main purpose is streaming talks live in ogg theora with icecast
 from LAC2006, DCLUG, BWBUG and maybe, if I can ever get myself out to
 Chantilly on first Saturday mornings, NovaLUG as well. Joern and I
 did this at LAC2005 and I've done a few DCLUG, BWBUG meetings and one
 SBE meeting since, but am looking to get my own gear so I can do this
 outside of RFA without relying on their equipment. 
The importation of raw video is just an exersize in dma, running it thru
the ogg theora to compress it will not be done in real time by any
commonly available cpu today and will heat the cpu quite a bit.  So it
will have to be treated as a file to file project where time is just
wall time.

In making that vcd, the import was in real time, the editing was in real
time, but the compression of 3 plus GB into that format and about 340
megs, took a bit over 2 hours on an xp2800 athlon wth a gig of ram, for
about 18 minutes of real video on the video cd.  Thats a performance
gap even a newer 64 bit whiz-bang cpu can't make up.  Theora might have
been quicker, but it had to play on a generic device so I haven't
explored/played with it yet.

...
   drive for half
an hour. That 20 minute wedding was over 3.8GB IIRC.
 But kino had no problems editing out my shakes.  And the resultant
 videocd I burned several copies of smunched that down to about 340
 megs with no visible loss of quality that I could see, and it played
 in everybodies cd readers as far as I know, in addition in my own
 dvd player, an el-cheapo Apex.

 Also, is there any such thing as a
linux-video-users list where this
might be more on-topic? I remember seeing a linux-video-developers
list in someone's sig here or on lad, but can't recall the URL and
didn't know if a video-user's question would be on-topic for that
list anyway. 
 Well, there is the video4linux list, but its rather
 hardware/software drivers for the hardware centric with little of
 the video artistic crowd around.  Personally I feel its more on
 topic on this list than that one, but thats just me being practical. 
Ok, I'll stay away from there for now. I do have an interest in that
stuff, but it's lower on the priority list for now.

  "Here be the artists" IMNSHO, and thats
meant as a complement to
 this crowd.  As an opinionated, experienced old engineer, they
 'tolerate' me for the most part :)
 :)

Thanks again.

-edrz 
-- 
Cheers, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's
stupid bounce rules.  I do use spamassassin too. :-)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.