Posts tagged canon HV40

Canon Vixia HV40 HDV Format Notes

Sep 3rd

Posted by kevin in video

So far I have always converted my HDV footage to NTSC before editing. For a small project I’m working on now, I’ve decided to try working directly with the raw HDV footage.

This thread explains why my m2t files show up as 1440×1080 even though they can be edited as 1920×1080 (aka 1080i). It has to do with square vs. rectangular pixels — or something — it doesn’t really matter. More general info on formats is here.

In Cinelerra, you must set the project format to 1440×1080, 16:9 ratio, then make sure you select “match output size” by right-clicking on the video track(s). This looks okay in the compositor window in Cinelerra, but the resulting file plays by default at 4:3 aspect ratio. You can set this manually when you open the video in VLC and see that everything looks okay. The only method I have found so far for getting the rendered video to play as 16:9 by default is by using a command such as this on to re-encode it after the fact:

ffmpeg -i full_render_test.mov -aspect 16:9 -sameq full_render_test_16-9.mov

For rendering in various formats, follow the instructions here as usual.

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Capturing from Canon Vixia HV40 in Ubuntu

Jul 1st

Posted by kevin in command line

I am very pleased to report that capturing from my new camera works like a charm.  I hardly had to do any tweaking to get it to work.

Here are some commands that worked for me to begin with:

  • grab video
    sudo dvgrab –autosplit –frames 0 –size 0 –format hdv –buffers 1000 –showstatus –timestamp /home/video/foo-
  • convert to avi format for facebook, etc.
    ffmpeg -i foo.m2t video.avi
  • convert to dv format for editing
    ffmpeg -i /home/video/foo.m2t -target ntsc-dv foo.dv
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