Video Systems
Working with Video Equipment
Way back in the seventy's when I was in the US Navy, I was also in charge of the onboard TV studio. Once in a while I would do the news broadcast. I set up a system where I could have slides appear next to me on the screen. This is how it was done. A slide projector focused into a camera that was reversed horizontally and vertically so the picture would come out right. It was zomed out so the slide was fairly small. A second camera was focused on me. To my right was a circuit breaker box that was covered in light blue paper. Somehow I lined things up so that when the two pictures were mixed the slide appeared where the circuit breaker box was. I ran the projector with a push button to advance the slides as I talked.
That was my first experience in video production. Things have sure come a long way since those days. In this section I hope to give up to date help in setting up video systems that are in use today.
New Infrared Remote extender
When I wrote my section on multimedia projectors the only option for using a remote control with a projector that is behind a wall was to build your own IR repeater. However the newest MCM electronics catalog has about 2 pages of Infrared repeaters with devices to allow multiple outputs over great distances. These devices solve the problem with trying to control a multimedia projector that is 25 feet up in the air or behind a wall.
DVD issues
My DVD burners are all but worthless. Most of the blank DVD's you can buy these days are 16X media. My older burner is a Sony 4x DRU-510 and the new one is a Sony 16X DW-D22A drive. However it does not do the new 16X disks and 8X media is very hard to find. I remember when 8X media came out. You could get a firmware upgrade for your burner to enable it to work with the new 8X disks. But all the firmware updates that I can find now are dated back in 2004. So I guess the moral of the story is you have to stock up on many years of supplies of blank media when you purchase your burner or just plan on buying a new DVD burner every year.
Now the DVD problems have gotten even worse. I bought two identical sets of 20 printable 16x blank media DVD's at Staples. The first 20 worked fine but the next 20 do not work every single time! They only burn at 4X on my 16X drive and then after about 15 minutes they fail to close out properly. I have tested them and they do play on my DVD player, so I guess they are useable?
The DVD Problem has been solved. If you own a Sony DW-D22a drive update it to a lite-on SOHW-1633S. The program needed is called ltnfw.exe and the binary needed is called BS41.Bin. Make sure you update the boot block as well. Once the uprgade is complete 16X DVD's burn at 12X in about 5 minutes each. It is well worth the risk, the trick is finding a program that will do the work without rejecting the drive beacuse it thinks it is not a lite-on drive.
Multimedia Projectors
Our first projectors were made by InFocus. They were purchased before I could research what projectors are best. The InFocus projectors require an expensive, high failure rate "cable wizzard", go through $400 bulbs a little to often, and are otherwise not that great. I prefer Viewsonic and NEC projectors perhaps because they also made good monitors.
There are two basic kinds of projectors, DLP and LCD. The DLP projectors are more efficient as they use mirco mirrors, but there is only black and white, to get the colors a color wheel is employed. To me that sends up big warnings. A rotating color wheel is a moving part and has to be a failure risk. LCD projectors use three LCD's one for each color. That presents two problems, first is alignment, second is LCD's have a gap between the pixels. This gap can be seen in a projected image as what appears to be "Boxes" around each pixel. LCD's are temperature sensitive and must be kept cool. Currently my favorite installed projector is a NEC VT465, but it has been replaced with a VT470, they are LCD projectors. The only problem is the "Clean the filter" warning, how do you clean the filter on a projector 25 feet up? My favorite portable projector is a Viewsonic PJ501. I have also seen some Epson Projectors that I have liked.
My first "please help" was with a projector installation where they had run only a network cable and one coax to their projectors. The correct installation uses 5 (or 4) Coax's, or you can use a 100 foot VGA cable if that is long enough. You can get screw on BNC connectors for the coax, just strip 1 inch of outer insulation and 1/2 inch of the inner insulation and screw it on. Then there are VGA to BNC cables available for about $15 each. To make the installation look good get BNC to BNC bulkhead connectors for where the wires go through the wall to the projector and to the computer.
Coax can run 300 feet or more and I have driven over 200 feet of coax directly from a VGA card! However two aditional devices are recomended. The first is a source select box that can accept Composite Video, SVideo, and VGA inputs. Viewsonic makes a nice one that came free with some of our Viewsonic projectors. The composite goes to the VCR, the SVideo goes to a DVD player and the VGA goes to your computer. The best test of a source selector is flesh tones, the cheap ones will make people turn green or purple. That is because they are also converting Video to VGA and most do not have a "tint" control to correct the color balance. The second device you should have is a distribution amplifier that can drive your projector(s) and a monitor to show you what is being sent to the projector(s). They should state in their specifications that they can drive up to 200 or 300 feet of coax, depending on what you are planing on doing.
This picture shows a typical video projector control setup. On top you see a Viewsonic N4 Video processor. It has the ability to select between live TV, Composite Video (VCR), S-Video (DVD), and the computer (VGA) inputs. It also has an infrared wireless remote control that is shown in front of it. Next is a VS-108 splitter. It has one VGA input to up to 8 VGA outputs and can drive over 200 feet of coax. Below that is the computer, it is a Athlon XP-2000 based system. Behind everything on the wall is a 9 hole keystone jack plate. It has 5 coax connectors for the VGA, one spare coax connector, a telephone jack for the IR repeater, a telephone jack for the screen control, and a Category 5 jack for the network. I had to enlarge the hole in the wall to fit the bigger jack plate.
If you cannot run 4 or 5 coax's to your projectors the next best option is to run a CAT5 network cable. Adapters are avialable to convert VGA to CAT5 and then to convert it back to VGA, they run about $100 to $150. Do not run it in the same conduit as sound signals and get shielded CAT5 cable if it is possible. I have seen loud sounds produce jitter in the projectors from them sharing the same conduit. Using Category 5 converters was my solution for the place where they had run only one coax. When I fired up the projector with the CAT5 converters the picture was over twice as bright and 4 times as clear! If you only have 3 or 4 coax's then cat 5 wire can be used for the vertical and horizontal sync signals without any converter. Also sync combiners are available that can send both vertical and horizontal sync over one twisted pair or over one coax. A 74LS86 sync combiner is available elsewhere on my web site.
In bigger installations there are generally two projectors. Sooner or later the question will come up, "Can we do two different things with them?" This is sometimes called "Split Video". Both screens can show the computer information like songs or a power point presentation, but by pressing a button one screen can be switched to a video tape, or a closeup of the baptism that is taking place. This is done by moving the video selector so it is connected after the distribution amplifier.
There are also front and rear projector installations to consider. Rear projection needs special screens and the projector has to be 16 to 20 feet behind the screen so there must be space for it back there. I have seen holes cut into walls to make room for the projector. The advantage is that lights in the auditorium will have less of an effect on the screen. The disadvantage is the lights must be out backstage! For front projection there are two types of screens, normal and glass bead. The glass bead screens give higher brightness but they are expensive and getting hard to find. Another option to consider is to use a motorized screen. We have two of these motorized screens each about 12 foot by 12 foot in size, and they cost over $1,000 each. One even has a remote control at the sound booth. The projector needs to typically be 24 feet from a 12 foot screen. It is easest to mount the projector level with the top, or the bottom of the screen .
One of the problems with projectors is getting the IR remote control to work. It is not cool to have to walk up on the stage to turn the projector on or off. We purchased some Jensen Wireless IR repeaters, but they lasted all of about a week! So I spent a week or two making various IR repeaters to try to do the job. I had been smart enough to run a network cable and a control cable up to the projector so a wired IR repeater was an option. After trying all sorts of IR repeater designs that I had found on the Internet, I settled on the only one that worked! The only drawback with this design is that the remote control must be within about 5 inches of the repeater. If it is lined up the LED on the repeater will blink to let you know that it is sending the data. Working with DVD's
Recently I had a friend who tried coping his SVCD's to DVD's. Needless to say the raw SVCD files played fine on a computer but they did not do so well on a DVD player. There are two problems to consider. First CD and SVCD use 44 KHz for their audio sampling rate. DVD players, on the other hand, use 48KHz to sample the audio. To fix this the video must be processed to re-record the sound. The second problem is that DVD players expect a special menu to use to select the video's from. Creating this menu is usually called authoring the DVD. A third problem, but not as serious, is that DVD's should have chapter markings added so they can be fast forwarded.
Results of testing home made DVD's in four DVD players. DVD Player Raw SVCD files Processed Pal Processed NTSC ---------- -------------- ------------- -------------- Apex Plays Rolls Plays Cyber Home Errors Rolls Plays Panasonic No Plays Plays Sanyo No Plays Plays
The four steps to create a proper DVD are;
Convert the DAT file to a MPG file - Used VCD Gear.
Convert the MPG file to 48KHz for the DVD - Used SVCD2DVD.
Create a menu of videos to select from - Used SVCD2DVD.
Burn the DVD from files created by SVCD2DVD - Used Nero.
The program I used to RIP the VCD file into a MPG file is called "VCDGear" VCDGear requires another program called WinRAR to run. WinRAR must be installed first, if you have a DVD player program you likely have it already. The VCD Gear program can convert the DAT files to MPEG while removing errors and VCD information. The resulting files will be a little smaller in size. You can just copy the DAT file to your computer and rename it as a MPG file but that leaves the possibilities of errors and of VCD data still being in the MPG file.
VCD gear is available at www.vcdgear.com. You can download it and extract it to the desktop to use it. Once you open the program you need to select "Dat->MPG", then enable Fixing MPEG errors, and then select "load". From the load window select the CD ROM drive, select the MPEGAV directory and select the file to process, it is usually called "Music01". If there are any doubts, look at the file size, it should be about 500 Meg for 60 minutes of video. Select "open" and the "open" button becomes a "save" button. Now you need to select where to save the processed MPEG file and what to name the file. You should save it in your DVD processing directory and name it "movie 1" or something like that. Then select "Start". One hour of video will take about 5 minutes to process on a 2 Ghz computer.
You need to repeat the above for each of the video's you want to put on your DVD. To do that you first change the VCD in the CD ROM drive. Then select "Load" from the load window, it will select the "music01" file for you automatically. Then you need to tell it where to save it and what to call it. All you need to do is to give it a unique name like "movie 2" and select save. Then select "Start" again and wait about five more minutes.
Putting the DVD together
The next program I used is called SVCD2DVD. It was only $10 to buy but since it comes from Europe that ends up being about $18 American dollars. DVDSanta may be easier to use but I could not get their program to work for me. I first tried version 1.5 of SVCD2DVD but the resulting DVD had the sound out of sync with the picture. SVCD2DVD version 2 requires that you downlaod Microsoft's .Net stuff to run. It also is set up for PAL and NTSC must be selected. In order to see that option you must be in 1024 x 768 resolution or higher. In version 2 the sound and picture on the resulting DVD stayed together. However I could not figure out how to name the selection buttons, so my first DVD said "Menu button" 5 times, and the menu rolled because it was in PAL mode. Another problem with VCD2DVD is that if there are any periods in the file names the program simply crashes.
These are the steps to using SVCD2DVD. First go to "Settings", "Menu", "TV Standard", and select "NTSC Menu". Next go to "settings", "process" and select a "Chapter point frequency" of Every 1 minute. Select Save as to save the settings. You may also want to save the default file locations in "general". Then go back to the movies selection. If you right click on "New Movie" you can add room for as many movies as you want to put on the DVD. At the top of the screen there are your "Assets" click on the arrow, locate and select the MPG files you want to put on your DVD and select all of them.
Next go back to the top "New Movie" and then select one of the assets from below and drag it up to the "Titleset Layout" box. It is a little slow and you might have to do it twice to get it to work. If you drag more than one movie here it will make the two into one movie. Now go to the "Name" and "Button Text" and replace the text with the name of your DVD and the name of the current video. Do this for each "New Movie" untill they all have a video selected and the correct text. Go back and double check your work.
Now to design your menu. First of all, select your background image. Next you may want to select the "Play all" button to give a button that will play all of the video's. Next arrange your buttons in the order you want, you only need to get them close to the desired locations. Next select all of your buttons by dragging a box around all of them. There are some buttons at the top that will "Align Centers", "Center Vertically", and "Make Vertical Space Equal" amoung other things. Now you are ready to "Process" your DVD. Select the icon of a CD with a green arrow near the top. Text should pop up saying "Author your DVD". It will ask you if you want to include the menu and if you want to start Nero burn automatically. I do not start Nero so I can review the work and make sure it turned out right.
When SVCD2DVD finishes about a half hour later, it is a little hard to tell it is done. The last line of text will say "Done: Authoring DVD Folders". If you use windows explorer to view the video_TS folder that SCVD2DVD made there should be three "video_ts" files that are your menu. Then for each video there should be 4 files. One of the four will be as big as the MPG file you started with, it is the actual DVD video file.
Working with Nero
The last program to run is Nero. You need a version that supports DVD's. When I first ran Nero with a blank DVD in the drive I could not figure out what to do next, so I told it to burn a VCD. It promptly crashed but I could see the top of the Nero opening selection box above the crashed message. It has a place to select DVD or CD-Rom. In Nero Express you need to select the drive. It may say "Sony D22 CD-Rom" or "Sony D22 DVD". That is the same drive but with two different types of blank media. It will set things up correctly if you select "DVD".
Next, to select the directories to burn, you need to find the "VIDEO_TS" files that SVCD2DVD created. They should be called video_TS and audio_TS. In these directories should be all of the files you need to burn your DVD. Nero should be asking for the VIDEO_TS folder and that is all you need to "add" to make your DVD. Highlight the "Video_TS" folder and select "Add" and "Finished". Then select "Next" and "Burn". In about another 30 minutes you should have your first DVD. Don't feel bad if you make a few coasters, we all do it.
Video Security systems
Where I work we now have 6 video security systems covering 6 buildings. They are spread out across a college campus. Each system had 4 cameras tied into a computer that records everything. The cost is actually very reasonable when you use an old pentium 3 computer to do the recording. Some places charge as much as $400 for a Quad Digital Video Recorder card. However you can buy one direct from Hong Kong for as little as $10, with another $22 for shipping. The cameras are available for about $45 each, so the total cost is about $212 before you add the wiring and installation costs. For cameras you need to choose between Color or Black and white, between cheap ones, ones with IR lighting, ones with domes, and even ones with remote control.
To power the cameras you will need a 9 to 12 volt 800 Ma to 1 amp AC adapter. Some cameras come with AC adapters but keeping track of 4 AC adapters would be a nightmare. You might be able to put two of the AC adapters that came with the cameras in parallel, or have each AC adapter run 2 cameras. The cable running to the cameras can be either a dual coax or a cable with coax and 2 power lines. You can just use category 3 or 5 wire for very short runs under maybe 25 feet. Do not run two cameras over one cat 3 or 5 cable, you will get massive crosstalk. To use Cat 3 or 5 cable you need a blaun to match impedences.
For installing cameras in one building and the computer in another building you will need to use baluns. They enable you to send the video over 500 feet of telephone wire or 1000 feet of Category 5 network wire. Some people charge more for the balun than the cameras cost. A balun is a ferrite core with two wires wrapped around it. They are worth maybe $2 each! However somehow they have a huge markup on these baluns. The best deal that I know of is from MCM electronics. They sell a 4 port balun for $40, and sometimes it is on slae for only $30. Their part number is 82-8140. It has 4 BNC connectors on one side and a RJ45 network connector on the other side. According to their write up it converts 4 x 75 ohm BNC to 4 x 100 ohm via a RJ45 connector. You may need RCA to BNC adapters if your camera cables have RCA connectors on them.
When it comes to the computer it should be a Pentium 3 with at least 128 meg of ram and a 20 Gig or larger hard drive. Some of the DVR programs say they will not run on an AMD processor for some reason. If you add a network card the video files can be accessed remotely. Anyone can see them after they are recorded or with special software you can see them as they are being recorded. Almost all of the 4 port DVR cards are actually the same card and use the same Conexant Fusion 878A processor but the price varies widely. Most of them come with Pico 2000 software, but some may come with better software. When you install the Pico 2000 program it will not be useable untill you locate and install the english packs. Once you select the four cameras and set it to record be sure to go to utilities and set it up to remember settings. Then restart the program to actually start recording.
PictureTel 4000
At the Hamfest I also picked up a PictureTel remote control camera to play with for $25. They sold out quickly as they were likely worth about $800 new. So far I have powered it up and hope to be able to tell you how to get it to work in the next few days. There are more of them for sale on ebay.
The PictureTel 4000 PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) camera sells for so little because the picture is very poor, they use an old tube type camera and the tilt mechanism is sloppy. With myne all the whites were yellow and the picture was not very clear. I had hoped to find a place to adjust the color balance but so far I have not found one.
Camerapad.com This is a link to a company that sells software to run PTZ cameras. They have a free download for a trial version and it is $50 to buy it. BDLcam This company has a free program to run webcams. You must first power up the camera then start the software on your computer. The software sends control signals when it starts to take control of the camera. If you loose control shut down the program and then restart it.
To get it to power up, first I figured out the logic board and then from that I have determined the pins on the power connector. The power can be configured backwards, that is, the camera can run off -12 volts or it can run off +12 volts! You can use a normal 12 volt 1 to 2 amp AC adapter to run the camera. With the single board CMOS camera installed it only takes one half of an amp to run the modified camera. The power connector can be taken from an Apple printer cable. The drawing below is as seen with the connector plugged into the camera. The left most of the three power pins is also ground. The bottom two pins are for serial communications. The unmarked top two pins may be composite or svideo signals.
Video Studio 8
Currently I used video studio 8 and an ATI 32 meg all-in-wonder graphics card with a built in TV tuner. However whenever I attempted to use video studio 8 in its default settings many frames were being dropped. This shows up as a jerky movement when something is moving in the video. I tried a number of tweaks to find the best setting for use with the ATI card. My conclusion is that the card has built in MPEG1 compression but the software tries to do MPEG2 compression. That is too much work for my 2.4 GHz Athlon XP with 768 Meg of ram and 300 gig hard drive. I also tried a fast SCSI hard drive but it too dropped frames. Here are the settings that need to be tweaked.
To stop dropping frames first I had to reformat a hard drive with a NTFS partition. Then I did a clean install of Windows 2000 and then Video Studio 8. Do not install an antivirus or any other program to keep the installation as clean as possible. Then I used the following settings, they are close to the SVCD settings. Use MPEG1 compression, 24 bits of color, 640x480 resolution, 29 fps, Upper field first, 4:3 aspect ratio, a Variable maximum 4000 bit rate, and 22.4 kbps audio rate. That lasted for 2 weeks then it started dropping frames again! I have been able to get the dropped frame counter to work, just run Video Studio and select the edit mode. Then change to capture mode.
I have a newer camera! It is a Sony DCR-TRV530 purchased on Ebay for only $127, with shipping it was $142! I know you won't believe me so the item number is 300000034289. It supports firewire video capture so there are no more dropped frames. It also has a microphone input, and I have purchased a shotgut or boom microphone for it so the sound should be better. Most camcorders made today do not have a directional microphone so they pick up sound from behind the camera!