Hello everyone,

This is my first post so please be gentle. I may ask for something, which may have been answered before but please bare with me.

I am trying to help a group of individuals who are hearing impaired; to gain access to information and seminars that are usually held for normal hearing people. How I intend to do is while the speaker is giving his speech, a signer stands next to him or in a designated place where he can be seen by hearing impaired students. I intend to use two cameras. 1st(which is fixed to the ceiling) will be pointing at the speaker while the second camera I wish to use (I haven’t bought it as yet but intend to - is Sony TRV33) will point towards the signer. This will be placed on a stand.

From the specifications of TRV33 I believe I can shoot and edit on my PC. What I want to do is to some how use both the clips. 1st clip shows the speaker while at the same time on the right hand corner (or left hand!) the clip with the signer is imposed. Just like the news broadcast for hearing impaired is aired. Want to subtitle it and then either make a VCD or a DVD.

Questions:

1 Is it possible?
2 What hardware would I need? (Remember this is for the charity and everything is going out of my pocket)
3 Is sony trv33 good for this particular purpose? If not – any suggestion? BTW this is going to be my personal camera for home videos as well.
4 What software should I use in order to accomplish the above?
5 Any tips or guides you could provide will be highly appreciated for such as sound, lightning, positioning etc.

I am not a professional at PCs or movie making but neither am I a newbie. I have been using the cameras for over a decade but just for simple tasks – not for something like this for which I have committed my self into. When it comes to PC’s I am quite an expert so hardware/software – just shoot. If I get stuck – I’ll scream for help

Please help!!!!!!!!
Any advice will be appreciated.
THanks.

[MarkE19]

1. Yes, and not too difficault
2. A New(ish) PC with plenty of disk space - 4 minutes of DV footage uses approx 1Gb of disk space and just add a £20 firewire card.
3. Any DV/Digital8 cam will do the job.
4. Adding one picture within another might be quite complex, therefore the higher spec software would be recommended. I would suggest Adobe Premiere as this is a great, but not too easy to learn programmme. It also costs several hundred pounds!
5. It might be worth looking at one of the Matrox packages like the RTX.10/RTX.100 as these have all the software/hardware in one that you will need.

Hope this helps.
Mark.

[Duncan Craig]

Hi,

Personally I would avoid doing it in post production and try to get a vision mixer that will do picture in picture, that way you won't have to digitise as much footage to acheive the end result and won't have to render the DVE box which can be very slow.

You could record onto S-VHS or something as the mixer output, and have tapes running in the two cameras as ISO recording (isolation recordings - I work in TV and do this sort of stuff all the time)

If you need to repair the shots you can go back to the original camera material if needed.

Of course the output of the vision mixer may only be S-Video or composite, so you'll see a difference in quality if you do any shot replacement to it - may only be very slight.

There are a lot of factors involved but I guess all you will be doing is compiling all the speeches into one smooth run, so you won't be editing the actual content, just piecing seminars together.

I used to use MX50 mixers to do this sort of thing I think, perhaps there's some cheap mixer out there now which you could hire from you local AV company, It'll save you a lot of time in the long run.


Unlees of course you have a realtime DVE card in your PC that is....



edit:

Panasonic MX50 that's it.