Some good news, the Wings AV card will most certainly capture at 640x480 and possibly even higher. I'm pretty sure I just saw it pull video in at 800x600.
The next hurdle to overcome was a limitation with Mac OS 8.6 and Apple's bundled Video Player tool that restricts the recordings to 2GB and fails to split the video after that. As such recordings are limited to 4.6 minutes, 9608 frames which comes out to exactly 2GB of uncompressed video. The solution is to use the Wings AV card with Final Cut Pro, although I hear Avid (Strata) VideoShop 4 or Adobe Premiere 5 works just as well for the task. So far i've been able to pull 12 minutes of video without dropping any frames as a test, and i'm sure the machine would be able to do much better than that still.
The other trick to these third party/professional grade video tools is the ability to use on-the-fly compression, which helps reduce the file sizes during and after importing while using the full power of the G4's Velocity Engine. Even AltiVec has its limitations though, so the best solution so far seems to be to rip the video uncompressed, let it split during import as necessary and use a much more powerful machine to do the compression. I'm hoping the machine can handle the task, I have 8 more minutes of importing to do to break the 2GB limit, and if it passes from here, then it's pretty safe to say it'll do 30 minutes to an hour without flaw, and that's more than enough for a machine of its age.
The next challenge is getting the video out of the Power Mac and onto the iMac Intel for compression and encoding. Considering it only has 10BaseT ethernet, networking probably isn't the best solution, but i'm experimenting with a PCI FireWire card at the moment to see what options that opens up. So far it seems promising.
The next hurdle to overcome was a limitation with Mac OS 8.6 and Apple's bundled Video Player tool that restricts the recordings to 2GB and fails to split the video after that. As such recordings are limited to 4.6 minutes, 9608 frames which comes out to exactly 2GB of uncompressed video. The solution is to use the Wings AV card with Final Cut Pro, although I hear Avid (Strata) VideoShop 4 or Adobe Premiere 5 works just as well for the task. So far i've been able to pull 12 minutes of video without dropping any frames as a test, and i'm sure the machine would be able to do much better than that still.
The other trick to these third party/professional grade video tools is the ability to use on-the-fly compression, which helps reduce the file sizes during and after importing while using the full power of the G4's Velocity Engine. Even AltiVec has its limitations though, so the best solution so far seems to be to rip the video uncompressed, let it split during import as necessary and use a much more powerful machine to do the compression. I'm hoping the machine can handle the task, I have 8 more minutes of importing to do to break the 2GB limit, and if it passes from here, then it's pretty safe to say it'll do 30 minutes to an hour without flaw, and that's more than enough for a machine of its age.
The next challenge is getting the video out of the Power Mac and onto the iMac Intel for compression and encoding. Considering it only has 10BaseT ethernet, networking probably isn't the best solution, but i'm experimenting with a PCI FireWire card at the moment to see what options that opens up. So far it seems promising.