00's Plays of the Decade Video Montage

Over the holidays, I spend a good deal of time pulling year-end and decade-end sports montages from various places. If you are a video nerd wondering exactly how, well here's the set-up.

I use a $99 capture device from Pinnacle Systems called their Video Transfer. It takes in analog video only, which is disappointing in today's Hi-Def world, but to my knowledge, there isn't any way to capture true HD video from say DirecTV and save it to your computer in an "unlocked" file format.

The networks and content producers in Hollywood, are rightly afraid of people pulling pristine hi-def copies of movies, shows and such, then releasing them to the internet wild like a profit eating virus.

So they deliver HD content to your DVR or receiver in an encrypted format, and the box itself does the decoding ju-jitsu as you watch it. They don't output any readable or understandable HD video codec to any capture card on the market.

Bastards!

Still, this little box does pretty well for web posting stuff, and YouTube.

The DirecTV output in analog, actually gives my Pinnacle Transfer a 16x9 (widescreen) picture, it's just smushed into a 4x3 box.

No worries.

I take that video, then "re-stretch" it to 16x9 dimensions by using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum.

The result, is a pretty nice wide aspect video, in a ample size for internet viewing without too massive a file size.

So go ahead, take a look at ESPN's awesome "Plays of The Decade" and enjoy.