In order to make a video clip you need a camera… what quality, resolution is needed what possibilities are available and what are their limitations.
Lets start with the device which is the most importent to make the video clip, the camera. Basically every camera can do the job, and webcams are not excluded. Practically what you want to achieve is the most importent factors. A webcam with high quality sensor (CCD) in 704×576 pixels resolution is as good as any camcorder however its limited due to the physical connection to the computer. no matter how you see it, once your clip is online the maximum resolution will be 704×576 (sometimes 720×576 in this case some players will not be able to handle it). Therefore trying to get the device with the maximum resolution is a waste of energy and in most cases money anyway If your clip is bound to end up on Youtube it will, one way or the other be reduced to 320×240. If you are using your digital camera or pocket pc with a built in camera remember your output quality will not be the best dues to the very losy compression method of these devices, The same fact is true for mobile phones. The advantage is the simplicity of transfering the data to the computer, which is actually a simple file copy operation.
1) If you have a DV camera then the file will have to be downloaded to the computer later despite the fact that its a digital file it will staill take a long time (1:1 i.e every minute will take … a minute. In order to download a movie from a DV camera you will need a DV input on your PC (most laptops today comes with DV input built in)
2) If you have a standard analog camera your problem is the same (the need to download it to a computer) but you will need a different connection (video capture device or an encoder). Video capture device is easy to find and not expensive. The encoder is a little different because it encodes the video in hardware chip a process that makes everything faster and reduce the need of processing power from the computer and the result is usually an mpeg file rather then a heavy AVI. Video capture devices are also called Digitizers (they convert analog data to digital file).
In all cases a video capture software can handle the job, and a software like the Clipmaker will be able to handle both the DV, Digital camera, or webcam.
