Tech Notes

The pictures and sound on this site were recorded on my JVC
Compact VHS camcorder. Obviously this gives a fairly lo-res image.
But it has the advantage of capturing many images a second
giving me more of a possibility of getting
just the right moment that will tell the story.

Digital cameras ( in my experience) are especially troublesome in terms
of doing this.  Though recent models do give a much higher resolution
picture, they have the annoying tendency to capture the moment
a half second behind what you really wanted.

I used Snappy hardware and software to transfer the images to my computer.
I wish I could wholeheartedly recommend it but I can't. 
It does the job, but it is incredibly awkward in it's interface,
and seems to have trouble accurately capturing colors from video tape.
I had to take all of the pictures into Adobe PhotoShop 4
(a program that I love) and do a bunch of manipulations
to get much of the color back into the images.

Also Snappy has the same half second lag that digital cameras have.
So when trying to get a specific frame captured it may
take as many as twenty tries to get the one you want.

Here's the routine:
I look at the TV and holding the VCR remote with my left hand.
My right hand is on the mouse.   I come to the spot on the tape
that is (I think) about a half second before the frame I want.
I click the mouse.
Nothing happens.
While concentrating on the TV
I have moved the cursor off the Snappy button.
Ok, rewind and try again.
This time it snaps and after it processes for about 15 seconds
and I move the cursor and click to get the
Snappy interface window out of the way,
I see a fuzzy picture of someone's feet.
  OK, rewind,
get the Snappy window up again and try once more.
You get the idea.

Then if the software does not go all buggy and not let me save,
I get to go through a long routine of saving each picture,
while the futuristic looking Snappy interface
pops up in the middleof each pic
that I am trying to decide to save or not.

After recently downloading IE 5 I found that my Snappy would not work.
I had to download a patch from Snappy to fix Microsoft's
replacing a .dll file for their monolithic reasons.
Now the saving process in Snappy is even buggier and I have to name
each file individually before saving.
And sometimes it will lose images before they can be saved.
Tech support has been unresponsive.

A vital tip for you Snappy owners.
disconnect the 9v battery after each use.   Otherwise it will be drained
the next time you try to use it. 

The sound from the video tape was edited and equalized in
Sound Forge another workhorse program that I can heartily recommend.
It was then encoded from the wav. file in Real Encoder.

Html editing in the amazing Dreamweaver. 

All the Gifs were animated in PhotoShop and Gif Construction Set Pro.

The new pro version is really swell.

Entire Contents ©1999 Gametone Universe