GooderVideo SteadyHand for Steady Video

Yes. Unfortunately, many spammers and viruses search the web and cached web pages on user machines looking for email addresses. We have spaced out our address to keep these machine readers from finding and attacking us. It may also slow down some of our human friends, but we know you’re more adaptable than a machine.

I only hope you’re also more forgiving of this inconvenience J

Do you have phone support where we can reach your staff?

Currently we do 100% of our communication via email in order to hold our overhead and thus our prices down... But if you include your phone number, sometimes we may call you to nail a problem quicker.

Email us.

Q

How can I tell whether DirectX 8 is installed?

A

DirectX 8 includes a diagnostic tool called "DXDiag", which will display the version of DirectX on the system.

In the Windows "Start" menu click on "Run…", type "dxdiag" and click OK
When the tool appears, you will find the DirectX version information in the last but one line of the display.

If you have DirectX 8 installed, you will find a line similar to:
"DirectX-Version: DirectX 8.0 (4.08.00.0400)".

Q

I f I compress during each editing step, will my video get worse and worse? How can I avoid this?

A

Because most video-compressors are “lossy”, they do not exactly reproduce the original. Each generation gets a little worse. To avoid this, ideally, you should use un-compressed video as the storage medium for each interim step.

Of course, uncompressed video can be huge. It might not fit on your disk, or because of the load caused by the sheer size, it might cause other problems such as dropped frames.

Another solution is to use a lossless compressor that will exactly preserve every bit of the input. These will not compress as well as the final, but will be much better than no compression at all. One that I use all the time is fast and free, called “HuffYUV.” You can find it at (http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html).

Q

Why can’t I use some compressors in the list?

A

The Compressors listed have two parts, a decoder for playing and an encoder for creating new files. Some are totally free and both halves will function on your machine. Others are sold by their authors, but usually only the encoder (file creation) is restricted. Following the model of Adobe Acrobat and Real Player, the playing part is broadly distributed for free so file recipients can play.

If the program refuses to use a Codec to make your output file, it means that you only have the play-back portion and not the encoder.

A second issue with codecs is that many have limitations on the format of the input file. Some only work on 256-color video, some only work on true-color. Further, some which are block-oriented, only work on videos whose sizes are multiples of whole blocks. Blocks are often 4x4 pixels or 8x8 pixels so this means that the video has to be a size divisible by 4 or 8 in horizontal and vertical.

Q

When I try a screen-capture of a video, it comes out blank – why?

A

Modern graphics cards have special hardware to play a video. It is created in a special off-screen memory and then displayed in a hardware-created window that you can see. However, this hardware window isn’t really part of the main display memory and many screen capture programs miss it.

I’m told that new, smarter screen capture programs do not make this mistake, but I haven’t tried them myself.

Instead, I take advantage of the fact that there is only one window supported by hardware. I open up one video to keep it busy, and then open up a second player to play the video I really want to capture. Since the hardware is busy with the first video, the second one is done with software and is fully accessible to capture.