The new Camcorder

Not sure if I mentioned it but the camcorder finally arrived 2 days before Christmas. I haven't played with it alot as far as taking videos. One night last week we ran out of wood pellets and nobody in the area from Redding to Orland that was open had any. Safeway in Burney had about 30-40 bags so I decided we would go up first thing in the morning.

Took the camcorder and took some nice shots...of the Burney area with all the snow trying out my telephoto lens and the tripod etc. and successfully got some great shots. On the way home stopped and got some more pics of Montgomery Creek Falls, and an old mine in a 1 horse trough town called Ingot.

Somehow while previewing the video after I got home I deleted it all.

I was able to figure out how to use the camcorder as a webcam so I purchaced a mini tripod to set on the desk. Been playing with a few webcam programs and it seems to work ok....

I use a IM program called Trillian that I'm trying to get it to work with. I litterally refuse to install Yahoo or msn meeenger on my computer. I discovered that Windows XP actually ships with Netmeeting 3.01 even though there are no shortcuts to launch it.

Played with that today and setup the router and my firewall and tested ok. Seems that for anyone to see my webcam I have to place the call that is if they don't have a webcam.

Michael

Netmeeting has some other features that are now in MSN messenger I believe...whiteboarding, text chat and file transfer and desktop sharing  that I've been meaning to try out. It may be a great support or training tool or something.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Upvote Upvoted 0
4 responses
oh boy... if you need info - my father is a Microsoft MVP, THE guru of moviemaker... site is www.papajohn.org you'll be spending hours and hours with that new toy!!
— Happy
Wow Thanks!
Actually I use an editor called Womble and have been using it for a couple years now. I started out editing out previews from vhs tapes I was converting to dvd and them moved on to editing out commercials and have moved on to creating my own movies somewhat.
I also belong to an amatuer video group on Yahoo that many of the people use even higher end stuff like Ulead Video Studio, Adobe Premier etc.
Speaking of hours...I've spent over a year on a dvd I'm creating from vintage footage. I'm doing alot of frame-by-frame restorations to get some of it to actually be viewable again.
Thanks for the tip it looks like a great resource and I'll definately pass it on!
— TechZilla
Windows MovieMaker sucks compared to Apple's iMovie. I haven't tried Adobe Premiere Elements, which I got with my Nokia N93. Then again, I try not to do that stuff on a Windows box. Makes my head hurt.The reason that NetMeeting won't work is related to address translation. Like most "good" people, you probably have your computer behind a Linksys (or similar) router. Well NAT (and a one-way firewall) breaks the H.323 protocol that Netmeeting uses. It works okay when you initiate the call because outbound traffic should work okay. It won't work the other way around. (FYI, NetMeeting is no longer supported by Microsoft)Not sure if Trillian supports the video camera. Skype does, as does SightSpeed--my video client of choice, and it works really nice behind a Linksys router.
— PhoneBoy
By the time I got around to playing with WMM for the first time, I wasn't totally impressed. Probably because I had progressed in my skill level and demands for ability from the app I'm using. For somebody with no experience. it can provide a decent starting place. I've heard from more than one person though as to the quality and capability of iMovie though.
I discovered,much to my dismay several years ago, that the H.323 protocol was not routable. This little exercise proved nothing has really changed with that. I opened up ports on the router etc. but one-way seems to be the way it will always go.
I believe Trillian may support the camera but it seems to turn on my Haupaugge PVR 350 by default and won't switch sources once its turned on. The way Trillian works is that first you turn it on and then you have access to the settings for it. You don't have a setting to choose which capture device to select by default. Disabling the PVR has little effect even though Trillian will load the Sony driver but not open up any settings for it...meaning it is likely not compatible. It may though if Sony makes ever a compatible WDM driver for this thing
Haven't tried Skpe yet but do have SightSpeed working somewhat. I get an echo on the mic test that's not very acceptable.
— TechZilla