Masked Bandits Attack!

Masked Bandits Attack!Well, okay, so these bandits were really just stealing Scrappy’s cat food from the patio, but this time I had my new trusty JVC GR-D270 lying around, and decided to try out its night vision mode to try to get them on tape. A few minutes of work with Microsoft’s Movie Maker, and voila!, here they are, ready for an appearance on America’s Most Wanted.

I’ll have to remind everyone not to feed Scrappy outside. These guys are big, and as my wife pointed out, they do carry ticks and the like. Best not to give them a reason to come down the hill to interact with our sometimes feral cat. Still, they are cute on film.

Addendum: Was this valuable to anyone?

Addendum 2: I can’t spell “Raccoon”.

3 thoughts on “Masked Bandits Attack!

  1. uriel

    might have been ‘useful’ if it were in a format I could play…

    Editor’s note: Sorry, it’s the most convenient format for me to transcode to. When I encode to Quicktime, people bitch that it should be Windows Media. When I encode to MPEG 1, people complain about the quality and/or filesize. Consider this a good incentive to check out VLC.

  2. Josh Bancroft

    Glad to see another geek podcaster getting into video, Mark! In that sense, this is definitely useful – keep it up!

    I’m using what sounds like about the same process for TinyPodcast Video Edition – dumping video from my Sony DCR-HC40 via firewire into Windows Movie Maker, then exporting into WMV. I’m interested to know the settings/resolution you’re using for both the initial grab from tape, and the final export (I’ve been fiddling with different settings, and I think I’ve found the ones that works the best for me).

    I get people complaining about WMV format, too, but until Quicktime is free/as full-featured as Movie Maker, or there is an option to create a DivX movie that’s as simple as Movie Maker, I’ll stick with it. Not that I’m not smart enough to use some other tool, but I’m just as much “evaluating” the video tools that are out there as I am making video content.

    Regards,

    Josh Bancroft
    http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com

  3. Mark Post author

    Hey Josh, glad to hear from you again.

    I’ve shot less than a half hour of video with my camcorder (hey, just got it last week) but here are my impressions so far.

    This is the first digital camcorder that I’ve used, and I must say that video capture and processing using FireWire is great. I don’t currently have a fully functioning Linux box running (actually the box would run, I’m just short a monitor for it) so I haven’t played with dvgrab/kino, I’ve just been playing with Movie Maker under XP. Movie Maker seems to work simply, quickly and well.

    For now, I’ve been fetching the video in the super verbose DV-AVI format (25 megabits per second) and then transcoding that down to smaller formats for playback later when I’ve completed my crude attempts at editing.

    This raccoon video was produced using the “Video for Broadband 345Kbps” setting.

    I probably should produce standard mpeg-2 or mpeg-4 for maximum compatibility. I like using ffmpeg for transcoding, but this was just a short test, of limited use, so I didn’t bother to transcode.

    Have you checked out Systm? These kids put out a pretty damned nice show on hacker topics. Great stuff. Inspiring even.

    Hope that helped.

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