Need help with AVI Spy Camera

[idealhusband]

Hi Guys

I have very little experience with video recording except for the grandchildren affairs

I am a Radio Control airplane flyer and have been using my Flip camcorder in a HATCAM for the ground work .That seems to be working very well .I believe the Flip camcorder is a MP4 format .

My problem is with my spy cameras that I put onboard the airplane for flying video .The video frames stop for several seconds while the audio continues .Can it be it is not writing fast enough ?

Is there an inexpensive program to capure both formats so I can edit both of them together ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFvfUjpUhek

Thanks
Charlie

[redwudz]

Could you give us a link to the 'spy' camera? Is it recording the video in the plane or transmitting it to a ground receiver?

Most times these types of video aren't 'captured', just transferred to the computer from the camera memory or from a memory card. If the video is incomplete from those sources, you have a problem, but with the camera or the storage.

MP4 is a generic term for a family of video formats. Maybe Xvid, maybe something else. MediaInfo will give you the codec used and the real video/audio format.

Usually you can't edit different formats together. But you can convert them to the same different format, then you should be able to easily edit them.

Most highly compressed formats like Xvid or H.264 aren't made for frame accurate editing. But you can convert them to a format that is easier to edit. If you just need to do rough cut and paste, there are quite a few editors out there. AVIDemux is popular, and also VirtualDub.

Give us a bit more information and you will likely get better advice.

And welcome to our forums.

[idealhusband]

Hi Red

Thanks for your prompt reply.

I did use the wrong term when I said capture ,I have no idea what that means.
but I thought it best described what was happening .

The video is being taken by the camcorder and is stored on a card .It has a 4 GB Kingston micro card .Here is a link to a camera on EBay which looks the same as mine http://cgi.ebay.com/Mini-DV-Camcorder-DVR-Video-Camera-Spy-webcam-MD80-/260628121251?c...item3caea586a3

Did you play the YouTube video and see what I mean about locking up the video ?????

In regard to the Flip camcorder . I looked at the format for it which I have stored on a USB traveldrive .It is MPEG-4 and it is a HD camera.

Thanks
Charlie

[redwudz]

It's possible the Micro SD card is too slow. Or the problem is with the camera. It would still help to have the format of both cameras from MediaInfo. MPEG-4 is somewhat a generic term, the actual codec used is more useful. If one is Xvid and the other H.264, you will need to convert one or both to a common format if you want to edit them together.

You may also need to change the resolution or the framerate and the audio format, if used. If the videos are short and you have a lot of hard drive space, HuffyUV or Lagarith are lossless video codecs and very easy to edit with. The downside is they take up a lot of HDD space.

Capturing usually involves a computer or USB card that converts one format to another. Your cameras seem to already have a compressed format, so you just need to copy them to your hard drive.

What do you want your final format to be? If you are planning to convert to a DVD, then MPEG-2 would be my choice. If just putting up on YouTube, others may have some ideas. I don't use YT.