Recommended Specs for media PC

[zactommo]

HD video is widescreen not matter what, but SD can be either widescreen, or 4:3, which is the older style. Obviously widescreen is the norm these days, and having widescreen is desirable. In SD video, a thing called anamorphic widescreen is used; without going into all the technical details which you don't need to know, basically anamorphic allows your normal video SD equipment to do widescreen without any chances (except your camera & monitor, which need to have a widescreen option to support it)

The catch with anamorphic widescreen is SD, is sometimes devices don't know they are getting a widescreen signal, so they display it like 4:3, and the picture looks squished. I'm sure you've seen it before. The problem with DVD recorders, when being feed by a switcher is they don't pick up that they are being sent a anamorphic widescreen picture, and I've yet to find a model where you can force widescreen mode in the menu.

Hope that makes sense

[dareallyst]

Originally Posted by zactommo

HD video is widescreen not matter what, but SD can be either widescreen, or 4:3, which is the older style. Obviously widescreen is the norm these days, and having widescreen is desirable. In SD video, a thing called anamorphic widescreen is used; without going into all the technical details which you don't need to know, basically anamorphic allows your normal video SD equipment to do widescreen without any chances (except your camera & monitor, which need to have a widescreen option to support it)

The catch with anamorphic widescreen is SD, is sometimes devices don't know they are getting a widescreen signal, so they display it like 4:3, and the picture looks squished. I'm sure you've seen it before. The problem with DVD recorders, when being feed by a switcher is they don't pick up that they are being sent a anamorphic widescreen picture, and I've yet to find a model where you can force widescreen mode in the menu.

Hope that makes sense

Thanks.. yes I'm following you and know now what your talking about. I would have assumed the best option was to record & output DVDs in 4:3 but I will look more into a solution to stay with a widescreen format.

[SterlingAug]

My church was recording the service to HD tape (cutting out the music during the service manually using start/stop on the video camera) then replaying the tape to capture the stream to the iMac, cleaning it up using Final Cut Express, compressing it, then uploading to Vimeo. This process took way too long so I improved on it.

We now record directly from the camera to the iMac running Adobe Premiere Pro saving the file to the hard drive. We finally got a license to record the music during the service, so we record the entire service now (average time is 75 mins. which does not fit on a 63 min. HD tape...LOL). I then compress the .MOV file using Compressor 4 (available as part of Final Cut Pro) with the Apple Qmaster cluster configured to increase the processing power to speed up the compression. Vimeo then converts the file to .MP4 to allow playback on mobile devices.

I usually have the service uploaded to our website in less than 3 hours after the service is over. The church used to create DVDs for home use, but no one wants to buy them anymore so we stopped. We also found that there are too many compatibility issues with home DVD players not being able to play burned DVDs.

Check out our website if you are interested.

http://FindPurposeAtFaith.org and navigate to the weekly sermon videos in the right hand menu.