Recording in TranZendent?

[VFrog]

Hi all,
Decided to see how I fare at VJ software, so I thought I'd work my way through the freeware before I even think of purchasing some.

Tried Midivid - it won't even launch in XP. Tried Svi - too unstable on my machine. Despite the fact that I was really hoping for software with MIDI control, I gave TranZendent a try.

Wow! Very easy to use, even if it was quite the treasure hunt to find info on the controls. Hats off to MoRpH for his most excellent tutorial! I find it to be extremely intuitive (now) :p, and the controls are wonderful for my purposes. Plus it's far easier on the CPU than Svi.

Now to my problem - since TZT can't be used with a 2nd monitor, displaying it that way is out of the question for me. My laptop has video-out, but it shows the entire screen - not good enough since TZT's window is only 320x240. I'd prefer not to buy a zooming scan converter, since I certainly won't be gigging out for a while.

So, I thought, I can at least record my playing, and then mix it together to make small music videos. But recording in TZT isn't working well.

TZT is happily playing at 30 fps. I press Shift+F12, and it starts recording... and everything slows to a crawl. My 30 fps quickly drops off to 0 fps, the program responds sluggishly, and any recorded AVIs look the same.

Two questions:
a) Am I doing something wrong, or is it just that my laptop can't handle recording? It's a 1 Ghz PIII 256 MB RAM, so I thought it would be up to snuff, but maybe not.

b) I chose to use the Indeo 5 codec in the supplied EXE. Is there perhaps a better codec to use? Would that be the problem?

Thanks in advance!!

[BrainStove]

Well pal, TZT indeed is a very friendly/powerful piece of VJ software, so if you want to squeeze every drop of power off it and get yourself a little bit married with such a Freeware VJ jewel... well mate, better to get that Scanconverter at least until some new version come out with a proper/nice DualHead handling feature. (I think not so far in the way)

As for the HD recording option, I suggest you are not using any codec choice for that task in real time, because is the codec work who is eating up all the processor resources, instead capture uncompressed and after that use any codec/app you like to get your final compressed clip.

Hope this help you ;)

[VFrog]

Thanks, Brainstove!

Yeah, I'll have to start hunting for a used scan converter. I noticed a few on eBay the other day for a good price, but think I'll master TZT a bit more before I splash out on hardware of any kind.

Tried your suggestion to record uncompressed video. It worked a little bit better, but not all that much.

As soon as I press record, CPU usage skyrockets again to 100%, and TZT records at less than 1 fps. Not eactly VJ quality, and nowhere near what I see onscreen when not recording.

Anyone else? Any other TZT users? Is this normal? Do you need dual 1.5 Ghz+ processors to record video, or is there some bug in TZT? Or do I just not have it configured properly?

Thanks,
VFrog

[itai]

hi,

it may be a bit of crooked solution, but you can try a screen capture software such as snagit to save avi files from tzt..

just a thought.. havent tried it yet

[burstingfist]

The best solution is to have 2 computers. One for playing TZT and the other with some sort of Capture device (Firewire, USB, PCI). This will result in good quality images with the best framerate.

I use one computer to mix with my VJ soft, then I capture via Firewire into PowerProducer which transcodes realtime into MPEG2. This is useful for making quicky DVDs for a gig.

[darrsum1]

As you are on the subject of screen capture software, maybe someone can help me.

I have tried using Hypercam to capture stuff but the resulting AVI is just a black screen, this also happens when using Visualjockey to create clips, any idea what the problem could be?

Creating clips with Moonster and Motion Dive 3 works.........

[Meierhans]

Screen capture is basicly always the last thing I do if nothing else works. These apps fight with VJ apps to get more CPU, dropping framerate, or even worse droping it to 2 fps once per second.

If you want to capture in realtime I would prefer using the Huffyuv codec. It was made for video capturing, needs very very small amount of CPU and reduces filesizes to 50 %.

It also reduces your HD usage to 50 % and on most PC`s (beside the ones that got SCSI inside) writing at your HD with maximum speed takes again CPU.
So beside tha fact that you can edit these files much better than uncompressed clips they could even take less CPU while capturing.

And yeah burtingfist, I fully agree with you.
If you got 2 PC?s its always the coolest thing to reserve one for recording and one for playback. Its just sad that you loose a little bit of quality. But I can live with that.

@darrsum1: Vjo can render offline. With Nashs "parameter capture" you can record all your key presses and controller changes while performing in realtime. For rendering trigger the playback of the "parameter capture" with "Engine-Rendering on" and convert the soundtrack you used into WAV and import it into VJO.
Now you can render your show in any resolution you want (+ Oversampling).

Keep away from Screen Capture Programs!! They suck! :P