SGI: Video

I wanna use my octane to create my own movies with softwares like m$ moviemaker.
So I don't know what are the names of theses softwares on IRIX. And I 'll be happy to found one that can use xvid or mpg and mpg-2 codecs.

And which software to create some special effects ?

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&fname=/SGI_EndUser/MediaTls_UG/ch03.html

afterwards you can encode with "mencode", which is part of: neko_mplayer-1.0rc1.tardist or use the builtin codecs, which are quite old.

sgi workstations have been the top of the line regarding video and/or effects. so there are serveral very special apps which are very good and very expensive. also they're not exactly plug & play.

if you just wanna edit something like the last holiday film with a few transition presets i doubt you'll be happy here ...

Keep your eyes posted on Ebay for a used Flint system or Effect Option 3 on the O2. These have dropped down in cost & are now very affordable. Sparks are still available for most of the older versions so as long as your willing to spend some extra time rendering you will have a very usable toolset at your fingertips.

Also check out a few of the used broadcast sites on the web. A few of late have had cheap flint boxes with sparks listed for reasonable money.

Timberoz

good hints from Timberoz but keep in mind you need to learn flint & co and you can only work with uncompressed material.
as i said i doubt that's the right thing for you according to your first post.

Geoman is right - if you're looking for a movie editing app with ease-of-use and a feature set comparable to M$ Movie Maker, use IRIX's built-in tool of the same name. High-end packages like Effect, Jaleo, or Piranha are overkill and will take far too long to learn (if you can even find them in the first place).

Just bear in mind that regardless of which program you use on the O2, you're going to be dealing with old codecs and a system that can only do NTSC video in realtime if it's either (A) uncompressed and accessible via a fast disk system, or (B) compressed using the specific M-JPEG codec native to the O2's video capture hardware. You will probably want to render the video uncompressed and transfer it to a fast PeeCee or Mac for compression & output.

Noob questions here:
From what I read on the above posts, I understood there is a Video Editor Software included with the standard IRIX installation. Correct me pls if I am wrong as I never touched an SGI workstation before, mainly due to prices
I read also somewhere that an early version of Adobe Premiere can be used on IRIX, how it compares with the one mentioned before?
I have an older Sony VX2000 MiniDV camera, with standard, s-vhs and firewire connectors. I want to know how I can use it with a SGI? I want to transfer some tapes I have in miniDV and edit them then output them on VHS or save them in some compressed format on the HDD.
Are there SVHS in-out possible from the O2 with the standard hardware or you have to buy an extra card? What about the Octane, I understood Personal Video option is an extra card, but what kind of video in and out allows?
What is the quality of the video capture files? Do you experience dropped frames with SGI capture like I use to on PC's?
Can those machines read jpg files from PC's or is a different format.
Can O2 or Octane render a series of TGA, JPG or TIF frames to an avi file, or mpeg?
And the higher digital options I guess do not support modern firewire, no?
Also, what are the prices for those video boards, if they are not integrated in the original system?

you can do all of that with an sgi an depending on your setup you'll never have dropped frames but the setup needed to achive that is quite heavy.
normally on sgi you have more or less 2 choices:
get really serious or not much at all.

Hiya,

Movie Maker will do the job but it is rather basic, Adobe Premier would be much better but the version available for IRIX is old, that said there are some SGI O2 plugins for Premier that allow the use of the ICE I think, making things a lot smoother.

If you just want to dabble then an O2 with the Audio/Video option would be easily obtained for very little money, it has the SVHS in/out and can also do Firewire with an added DM10 (or board that has the same chipset as the DM10) .. sometimes .. firewire is flakey from what I've heard and the camera support is limited

SGi reads in jpeg just fine, the O2 is actually a rather good machine for that since the ICE handles jpeg and motion jpeg in hardware (within limits)

Series of pictures to video conversion .. not a problem think the built in tools will do that but there is also mencode

You can get a range of digital video options for SGIs, most are aimed at the high end though (SDI input/output etc) but some are analog.
Firewire is available (DM10 or compatible) .. but support is limited.

Another software option might be "LiVES", looks pretty on the website .. just needs a compile+fix for IRIX which may or may not be easy.

Your biggest constraint is CPU power .. modern intel Core 2 Duo CPUs would encode the video MUCH faster than an O2, Octane or Fuel could ... unless you want to go for a big multi-CPU monster SGI

Also make sure you have LOTs of FAST disk, which in the SGI world means SCSI or SAS/SATA if you have a Fuel or Tezro with a LSI SAS controller installed.

Try things out with an O2 see how it goes

Mark

ocimpean wrote: Noob questions here:
From what I read on the above posts, I understood there is a Video Editor Software included with the standard IRIX installation. Correct me pls if I am wrong as I never touched an SGI workstation before, mainly due to prices
I read also somewhere that an early version of Adobe Premiere can be used on IRIX, how it compares with the one mentioned before?
I have an older Sony VX2000 MiniDV camera, with standard, s-vhs and firewire connectors. I want to know how I can use it with a SGI? I want to transfer some tapes I have in miniDV and edit them then output them on VHS or save them in some compressed format on the HDD.
Are there SVHS in-out possible from the O2 with the standard hardware or you have to buy an extra card? What about the Octane, I understood Personal Video option is an extra card, but what kind of video in and out allows?
What is the quality of the video capture files? Do you experience dropped frames with SGI capture like I use to on PC's?
Can those machines read jpg files from PC's or is a different format.
Can O2 or Octane render a series of TGA, JPG or TIF frames to an avi file, or mpeg?
And the higher digital options I guess do not support modern firewire, no?
Also, what are the prices for those video boards, if they are not integrated in the original system?

strandedinnz wrote: Firewire is available (DM10 or compatible) .. but support is limited.

Just a small correction : the firewire in the O2 came from Solectron, it's not the same as the TI chipset that DM10 needs. So as far as I've heard, the Adaptec does not work in an O2. The Solectron card is pretty rare.

And none of the "supported" firewire video options work in Fuel.

I've done straight camera-to-composite with an O2, worked okay.

Really they used a different board ? Never knew that! What an efficient use of resources .. oh wait!

which one works best ?

Mark

strandedinnz wrote: which one works best ?

The Adaptec works fairly well for disks. A little cumbersome but performance is good (except that fsr crashes the disk and the computer, so you want to make sure it doesn't run on any firewire disk.)

Video on a DM10 in a Fuel is (up to this date) a total loser. I still say we should all go together and buy a real one for Oskar45, then let him get support to support it

I've never owned a Solectron but rumors are that it would input but not output video. Someone on nekochan actually has one, could give them a pm. No idea about disks but disk support on the Fuel didn't work very well before about 6.5.28 and they quit supporting O2 long before that so I wouldn't put much hope in it.

Oh yeah. The software for the Solectron card will not work on a Fuel, according to posts on the forum.

strandedinnz wrote: Movie Maker will do the job but it is rather basic, Adobe Premier would be much better.......

Thank you for the answer.

ajerimez wrote: ... and a system that can only do NTSC video in realtime ...

Or PAL of course. ;D

Note that Effect on O2 can only stream video to/from RAM in 30 second bursts, not to/from disk continuously,
as opposed to Octane/Flame which has no such limitation. I think Flint on Indigo2 works the same way.

To the original poster: MovieMaker works ok for basic things, but try and do complex stuff and it will barf.
There are GUI tools for recording video and playback aswell (MediaRecorder/MediaPlayer) but in both cases
it is much better to use the command line equivalents which are more reliable. Premiere is ok aswell, and is
able to use the O2's acceleration hardware, but again it's not bug-free.

There are various freeware tools (Nekoware) you can use of course, mencoder/mplayer being the main items,
but even a max-spec O2 cannot use mplayer to play back full-size/rate DivX/MPEG2/MPEG4 video in
real-time (alas, O2's ICE hardware is not used to accelerate mplayer). O2 is very good at MJPEG video though,
and indeed can record direct to AVI which makes it easy to use a PC to convert movies into other formats. I use
an O2 for capture/editing/playback (CEP for short), but I use a PC for final format conversion. VirtualDub, DivX
Converter, PICVIdeo JPEG codec, etc. Plenty of tools available. I'll be building an i7 system soon to aid with
conversion (current system is only a 6000+).

Note that I do have some professional analogue video units for O2, but I've not yet looked into exactly what they
can do.

Lastly, my site has some hints/tips on capturing video using IMPACT Compression, but many of the concepts
apply to O2 aswell. Read the O2 man pages for full details of the individal commands such as dmrecord and
dmconvert, also note the presence of online books such as the Digital Media Tools guide. And read the release
notes too - all useful info.

If you want it *simple*, don't use an O2. Get a Mac/PC/Linux box. If you want it *interesting*, get an O2.

However, don't bother with an O2 if you're not able to afford or obtain a decent spec system. Using a lesser spec
O2 for this would not be a pleasant experience. I would recommend a minimum of an R10K/250 with 512MB RAM,
and whatever storage you need. For the R5K line, don't use anything less than an R5K/300, though even then an
R10K is preferable. Or get an R7K/600, that would be good. See my site for benchmark results , eg. video conversion.

Ian.

most people are not aware that 'blender' has a non-linear editing capability built-in. like everything in blender, it's a bit involved getting up to speed, but once you know the ropes you can get a lot done with it in this capacity; manage multiple sequences, write plug-in's, etc...