Recording a computer screen

D

djkoz

Well-known member
Is it possible to feed the the output from a laptop video screen or digital projector directly into the DVX100A?

I want to record a presentation being made on a laptop computer that is also being projected on a screen to the audience. I know I could use a program like Camtasia Studio to do this, but for various reason we have decided not to do it this way.

Instead of pointing the camera at the projection screen I would like to somehow feed the output from the laptop directly into the video camera.

Could I use some sort of cable that would connect the external monitor port on the laptop to the DVX100A? If so, into which ports on the camera would I make the connection?

or Could I take a feed from the laptop's Firewire port and feed it into the camera's RCA or Firewire ports? My guess is that for the Firewire port this only works in one direction, i.e. the camera can only send a signal out the Firewire port and cannot accept a signal fed into the port to record.

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks for your help.

Dan
 
Don't think so - but what you could do if the DVX100A has "pass-thru" (if not use a cheap cam that does) you could import the output from the projector straight to your computer via video capture using your camera as an analogue to digital convertor.
 
Firewire is a two-way connection, and the camera can receive a signal from the computer, but I don't believe you'll be able to send the computer display through that. It usually takes a video app sindeing a video signal through Firewire.

You can get a device called a scan converter, that will take the VGA out and convert it to a video signal that the camera can then record through either RCS or S-Video ports. There are good deals on ebay for used Extron scan converters. They are handy devices to have, especially if you do lots of event work.
 
djkoz said:
Is it possible to feed the the output from a laptop video screen or digital projector directly into the DVX100A?

I want to record a presentation being made on a laptop computer that is also being projected on a screen to the audience. I know I could use a program like Camtasia Studio to do this, but for various reason we have decided not to do it this way.
Click to expand...

Since I've not recorded anything via the DVX100 in the way of standard broadcasts, you can take this as a theoretical statement...

The signal presented to the DVX for recording on the 'video input' would be a standard NTSC or PAL signal, depending on what model was being used.

Hence, you would have to have a SCREEN->NTSC converter. Back the the ancient days, before time began, there were a number of computers that used a cheap converter, and it always looked like crap...

Which leads to the next item... in terms of square pixels, the standard NTSC horizontal line is 648 pixels wide, by 480 pixels high, more or less. (in terms of rectangular pixels, 720x486 (or so...)).

Then there's the fielding... current screens are 'progressive', that is full frames being displayed at the refresh rate, often at 'not 60 Hz' rates.


These days that is 'too small'... try setting your screen to those dimensions and see what it looks like... on laptops especially, setting the screen to something other than it's optimal, results in blur, due to the hardware 'upresing' the screen to fit the display. (There may be some way to have the screen just be a small subregion... but I've never figured it out correctly...).

In the case of a 'firewire' solution, driver software would have to be written/loaded such that the 'camera' became an alternate display device, which converts what ever the computer generates as square pixel display data, into a DV encoded stream. Maybe someone has done that for the DVX... or any other fire wire camera... I'm not aware of such, and further, enabled the writting of the 'DV' stream to tape...

The only 'realistic' way from my point of view would be to capture the laptop display, or projector's projection, via the camera as a camera. (Isn't there a monitor sync option to do just that??? or at least minimize the effect of differing refresh rates on computer/tv screens?).
 
Some laptops will send the display out through S-video or composite.

But no matter what, you're still limited to 720x480 for recording, and you either won't have much room (screen space) for your display, or it'll look terrible.
 
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