Digitizing Video in 15-462 / 15-463

The best method for digitizing video for this course that I know of is to use the IndyCams on the SGI Indy's in Wean 5205. Here is how to use an IndyCam to digitize a video sequence.

• Find an Indy workstation that has an IndyCam on top (funny little gray plastic log with a cable coming out the back). Slide the cover (with the SGI logo on it) to the side.
• Log in.
• cd /tmp - do this because the program you are about to run creates huge files in the directory in which it's run.
• capture
• Pull down on the icon in lower left and set it to camcorder (video) mode.
• The window should show live video. (Warning: some of the IndyCams in Wean 5205 don't work.)
• From the pulldown menu, select Actions and then Settings. If you want 320x240 resolution, then use "Half Size" and "No Crop" options. If you want 256x256 resolution, say, then use "Full Size" and "Square Crop" options. You might want to turn on "Auto Increment Filename after Save". You might find it necessary to set frame rate to 5 frames per second.
• When ready to do a test recording, hit "Record" button on Capture window. Video will be recorded until you hit "Stop".
• Video will be put in a file, e.g. "capture1.mv" in your current dir.
• You can preview this with the capture program or with the movieplayer program.

• dmconvert -D capture1.mv - to check the size and type of video file
• dmconvert -p video,filt=vblur -f tiff -n ##.tiff capture1.mv ##.tiff - to convert this to TIFF, with some vertical blurring to reduce interleaving effects. This creates a sequence of files, 00.tiff, 01.tiff, ...
• You could view these files with xplay ??.tiff .
• Move the files you decide to keep into your directory.
• Delete the files you don't need. Watch out because the capture program sometimes leaves huge directories with names like .capture.mv.tmpa000ad sitting around. You won't see them unless you run "ls -a" or "du".

15-462, Computer Graphics 1
15-463, Computer Graphics 2
Paul Heckbert, Jan. 1998