Mac Recording and Streaming/Mac Video Capture

Capturing on a Mac usually involves acquiring a device that will take analog video (yellow, red and white RCA cables) and convert it into DV (a type of compressed digial video used by digital video cameras). You can also use your digital video camera as such a device (just plug your game system or VCR into the camera, then plug the FireWire cable from the camera into the computer).

On the software side you will need only iMovie (free if you know how to get it, i.e. with a new Mac).

Once you've hooked up the capture device, start your source playing and open one of Apple's capturing programs, such as iMovie. If you don't immediately see your source playing on the computer when you open iMovie, try switching into capture mode by using the capture/edit mode toggle switch. You may also need to press the Play button on the on-screen display/on your capture device to see your source playing on the screen. From here it's pretty easy - just import whatever you want, then edit your clips (by scrolling to a specific point in the clip, then pressing Command-T) so they start and end when you want them to.

Once you have your clips ready to go, export them one at a time. If you want to, you can end your capturing adventures here by exporting to MPEG-4, the highest quality Internet-friendly format offered with QuickTime (choose "Expert Settings" when you go to Share your movie). I'd use 512 Kbps for the video track and 64 Kbps for the audio track. All of the encoders should be set on "Better" quality. Also make sure that "Hinting" is turned off. This will create a file that takes up about 4.3 MB for every minute of video it contains. Feel free to play around with the two bitrates to find a level of quality you feel is satisfactory.

If you want to create a 60 FPS file (double the framerate you will create by using MPEG-4), you will need to export your clips as full quality AVI files, using the either NTSC or PAL DV codec (not DVCPRO). By installing the MainConcept DV codec on an available Windows PC, you can use VirtualDub (which, for some reason, only runs under Windows at this time) to make full framerate videos out of your clips, even though you didn't capture them using VirtualDub. For more about this, please see the EDITING VIDEO section under the Editing in VirtualDub page.

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