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Webcam export

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DHCross
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Oct 13, 2014 3:21 am

Webcam export

Post by DHCross »

I am very intrigued by this software. I was waiting for Sound-spectrum to launch their "Darkroom" application, which does pretty much what this program does, but they decided to put their resources elsewhere for now.

So I spent a few hours tinkering with Magic last night and tried exporting a video. It worked except the webcam input. How do I export a video that includes the live webcam images in some scenes? The webcam worked just fine within the program during playback, just nothing during export. I didn't' see anyway to record the webcam image in advance of export.
Magic
Site Admin
Posts: 3440
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2014 9:28 pm

Re: Webcam export

Post by Magic »

The export feature is an offline process, similar to rendering a movie in any other animation or video-editing program. Especially with higher resolutions and complicated projects, it's almost always slower than real-time, so it doesn't really make sense to feed it real-time video input.

For example, if the video capture was happening at 30fps, but the movie export was happening at 10fps, it would end up playing back 3 times too fast. And even this assumes each movie frame will take an equal amount of time to render, which may or may not be true. So the result would be totally erratic.

In Magic, any real-time input is always ignored when exporting movies. This includes audio, video, MIDI, etc. If you want to capture a real-time session, we suggest you use a hardware recorder to record the HDMI video output of your computer. The one we recommend is the Elgato Game Capture HD (https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/gamecapture-hd).

You can use software to do the same thing, such as Fraps (http://www.fraps.com/), but it slows down your computer so that's why we don't recommend it.

Does that help?

Eric
DHCross
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Oct 13, 2014 3:21 am

Re: Webcam export

Post by DHCross »

That does help, and makes perfect sense.

However, is there any chance of limited webcam recording capability in the future just for a single scene before export?
Magic
Site Admin
Posts: 3440
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2014 9:28 pm

Re: Webcam export

Post by Magic »

It is certainly possible, but I think you will get equivalently good results (if not better) with third-party recording software and/or hardware as I mentioned above. That way you can try it right now and see if it gets you what you are looking for.

For example, here's a free software recorder: http://camstudio.org/. Haven't tried it though.

Let me know how it goes.
Eric
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