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Motion Capture Basic Understanding

A standard VideoCD movie data file consist of video and audio stream encoded, compressed and stored in 352x240 resolution. During playback, it is stretch to fill in full screen for conventional TV or Monitor in 4:3 aspect ratio. The data rate of a standard VideoCD movie is 172 KBytes/s.

Some mid-end display card have built-in video input capabilities and there are made for motion capture purposes. The highest input resolution for this type of card are normally  352x240 for NTSC signal and 352x288 for PAL signal. Thus, one will not get better quality if tries to capture and store movie at any resolution higher than that. The Snazzi  Dazzle Digital Video Creator has a highest input resolution of 352x240 for NTSC and 352x288 for PAL signal.

There are some AGP/PCI display cards such as the ASUS 3400 RivaTNT2 Ultra, Voodoo3 3500 TV, Canopus Spectra 2500 add-on video capture daughter board and etc, are capable of doing video capture but their quality and performance may not be the best compare to a dedicated motion & video capture card. The video capture card that I'm currently using is Matrox Rainbow Runner Studio (Bought it in 1995). I'm able to capture 352x288 29fps 24-bit color 16-bit Stereo 224kbit/s stream data into AVI format (flicker free) via only a Pentium MMX 266MHz 64MB RAM 1.2GB HDD personal computer. No doubt, a faster computer is recommended.  

Before beginning video capture, defragment your harddisk. Provide a large and clean free space to capture and save the file. I ensure my drive has free disk space of at least 3 times the size of estimated size of the capture file. (A typical 3 minutes 352x240 29.97fps 44KHz 16-bit Stereo Uncompressed AVI file will take up 520 MBytes of disk space.) Did I mention defragmenting harddisk ?

Close any unnecessary applications running at the background of Windows. Remove or close any program running at Windows tray, as there use up Windows resources or memory and put loads to CPU. 

Remember, CPU plays a very important role in motion capture as well as harddisk performance. Flicker or severe losses in frames may occur if the data stream caught in a bottleneck during time of capture.

With all the hardware properly organized, one will now need to configure its software. Select the input source, either NTSC or PAL. If NTSC is selected, then choose a resolution of 352x240 or any value lower than that. (Note: maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio) Set the frame rates to 29.97 or higher if possible. Any value lower than 23.976 will start to show degradation effect to the performance of the movie. Video with frame rate less than 15 is consider terrible.

To reduce CPU payload, it is best to capture movies using full frames (Uncompressed) Videos For Windows AVI format. Choose YVU Planar (Indeo Raw) AVI standard if possible, use MJPEG for Rainbow Runner or other standard support by the display cards.

If good quality audio sample rate is preferred, select the PCM 16-bit Stereo 44KHz 172kB/s format. Reduce the sample value to gain smaller file size or performance.

In order to encode and compress movie to a small file size for storing, some application is required. Media Cleaner Pro 4.0 by Terran is useful to produce Quicktime, MPEG1, DV and etc movie file. Ulead Video Studio 4.0 is great motion capture as well as encoder. To encode MPEG 1 standard movie only, Heuris Power Professional 2.0,  XingMPEG Encoder 2.2, Panasonic MPEG Encoder or LSXMpeg Encoder 3.0 can be used.

Here is a simple guide to encode and compress the capture movie file.
  1.  Capture to AVI 
       (a) 352 x 240 resolution
       (b) 29.97 fps
       (c) YVU Planar (Indeo Raw) format
       (d) AVI full frames (Uncompressed)
       (e) 16-bit Stereo 44KHz
       
        1.1  Encode to MPEG 1 (VCD Version2.0) or ...
             (a) NTSC VideoCD
             (b) 352x240 resolution
             (c) 29.97 fps
             (d) 172KBytes/s total data rate
             (e) 140KBytes/s video rate
             (f)  27KBytes/s audio rate
  
        1.2  Encode to Quicktime 4
             (a) Sorenson Video Compressor
             (b) 25 fps
             (c) 300Kbytes/s video data rate
             (d) Accurate scaling quality
             (e) Q Design Music 2 Audio Compressor
             (f)  16-bit Stereo 44KHz 6KBytes/s
      
Producing constrained data rate MPEG stream for VideoCD standards (172KBytes/s) result in poor quality movie compare to a high data rate MPEG 1 movie. But ,unlike Windows MPEG file player, a standard VCD player is unable to read high data rate MPEG 1 movie.  

Downloads TV3 Advertisement

  
352 x 240 29fps MPEG 1 Motorola V2088 TV3 Advertisement 1 (4.93MB)

Downloads Gran Turismo 2 Movie

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3' 30"  320 x 240  17fps  QuickTime 4.0 
Gran Turismo 2 Opening  (20.7MB)

ARJ program is needed to extract these files
Download ARJ HERE
Put all files along with arj.exe in a folder, i.e.  C:\temp>
At the DOS Pormpt, use this command to unzip  C:\temp>arj x gt2.arj -r -va
 
  

Downloads Soul Calibur Movie

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352 x 240 29fps MPEG 1 Seung Mina Kata (16.7MB)