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Avid Videoshop

NeXT

NeXT

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Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
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Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I was digging through a bunch of stuff as to make my junk pile vanish when I found this cd in a bag with its documentation and a quick reference card.
It's Version 3 (point something something) and after I installed it on my 8600 it seems to be some sort of video editing suite. I have heard of Avid before (apparently back in the inferior mac days they were next to SGI in video editing and production) and I'm wondering if something this old software is still useable.
Since none of my SGIs have any kind of video editing software to run the video input and output hardware they have (I have an Indigo2 with Galileo Video and hardware JPEG Cosmo Compression and an Onyx with Sirius Digital video) this seems like something interesting to mess with as it has a bunch of CODECS and editing options but how compatible would it be with something like say Youtube?

EDIT: I also forgot that to make .mov files seemed trivial for me and the output was always a video which was ridiculously large in size. Am I doing something wrong?
 
Youtube video is low rez with tons of compression.

Avid Videoshop was a low end package included with many of the A/V Macs (I have a couple copies of 3.0). It does decent work actually. Basically you capture at the best resolution and framerate you can, and then compress down to whatever you want. Video at the best settings takes up quite a bit of space. You migth have issues with audio syncing to video on long runs.

What resolution did you capture at, audio settings?
 
Well since I was just doing a test I plugged in a VCR into the A/V ports in the back of my mac and pressed play on it and record on the mac. The quality wasn't really good but it was better than nothing. Even if I can make 640x480 (or 1280x720) sized videos that will fit withing the ten minute time length on Youtube I would be happy but so far the output videos have only wanted to work in Quicktime and playing or converting it anywhere else results in errors.
 
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Everything recorded on the mac (outside of pro gear) uses quicktime.

Anyway Youtube is fine with 320x240 30fps video, dvix encoded with mp3 audio (basically very compressed).

There are plenty of Quicktime to DIVX encoders out there (I suggest you move the video to a fast pc and do the conversions)
 
So what I could do is have one system designed to capture video from my camera (Canon L2 Hi-8 camera), preferrably one of my SGIs, move it over to the mac for the video editing and then send it off to my pc for encoding and then uploading?

Sure as hell is not the most efficient way to do things but it sounds reasonable enough.
 
My god, compression is an absolute joke.
I tried saving a two and a half minute long piece of work as an MPEG-4 file and it turned into a monster 430MB file from a tiny 68MB Quicktime video file. How in the name of god is it doing this?

EDIT: Gah!
I tried to save it again using the Motion JPEG A CODEC that the original video file came with and the file bloated to a gig in size!
 
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I try to save it as a movie and from there I get three different formate to save it as: Reference movie, self contained or cross-platform.
The reference movie is useless as it requires all other files used int he editing to be present and even then won't properly play back in a Quicktime player and the other two formats, no matter what I have tried so far just give me these bloated videos that barely work with Quicktime (saving as an MPEG-4 gives me grabled audio in fact) and won't work on Linux or Windows.
I can probably pass off the cross platform playback issues as something you can only seem to associate with mac software of the time but there is no reason for the videos to bloat so badly.

EDIT: I'm reading through the manual and according to it, a self-contained movie that's 3-4 minuets long should only chew up8 or 9MB of space. I'm assuming this if you are using some crazy low resolution.
 
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