For those interested, the video footage was shot on a Sony 3100 Hi-8 camera with an excellent 21x optical zoom lens with optical image stabilisation.

This was then transferred to a PC video workstation based on the FAST AV Master capture card. Editing and effects were applied through Adobe Premiere 4.2 while the audio track was extracted and processed in Cool Edit to compensate for the hall acoustics. The end result was compiled into 8 AVI file chunks totalling 10Gb of video data across two AV hard disks.

Limitations in Microsoft Video for Windows code prevents AVI files growing to more than 2Gb so special caching software was used to play the chunks in sequence seamlessly for the completed S-VHS tape. It does this by holding the first few frames of each chunk in memory, allowing the hard disks time to seek to the next chunk in the sequence.

Finally, I used the Xing MPEG1 encoder software to make the clip for this site and a VideoCD. The latter required 25 hours solid rendering time to complete! Fortunately, I was at work and then out on the tiles - eating, drinking and being merry while this was going on...

I have to watch the finished video on either S-VHS or CD because although I could restore the original from a backup tape, it takes about 3 hours. I could do with one of the new AIT 8mm tape drives that Sony has just brought out (25Gb @ 180Mb/min. against DAT tape's 12Gb @ 65Mb/min.) but you don't want to know how much those cost - trust me.

If you want to find out more about desktop video try:

FAST who make the AV Master or
Miro who make the DC 30.

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