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May 18, 2005
Week 6 Progress
Video Pilot testing
1st run through - 5/18/05 - Concept
Johnathan, John, and I performed some pilot tests to test the usability of capturing data while a subject is performing assigned tasks. We attempted to perform tasks a subject might do such as opening applications, working on a project in Eclipse, instant messaging people, browsing the internet, and editing text files. We also tested out a firewire webcam to see if two users would be captured in a single frame. Tests were also conducted on the use of Morae itself and the playback of recorded video.
Installed Morae on 2 machines
Test case 1
- Time to perform task (5 minutes)
- Eclipse - Open a project file, scroll through documents, edit some files, and compile project.
Results
We noticed a slowdown when recording versus using only Eclipse. Since the slowdown occurred even without a webcam attached, we decided adding more programs will only take up more resources and slowdown the machine even more. The use of Windows Remote Desktop would only inhibit the machine further, also bringing about problems of video syncronization between what Morae records and the speed Remote Desktop would be able to capture from another machine. A more powerful video card should be used. On-board one not good enough.
Test case 2
- Time to perform task (12 minutes)
- Eclipse - Open a project file, scroll through documents, edit some files, and compile project.
- AIM - Sign on and instant message some buddies.
- Internet Explorer - Use for looking up information in JDK 1.5
- TextPad - Use as scratch paper
Results
Eclipse's compiling speed was alright. Too a little bit longer to open program than normal. Scrolling was noticably slower. AIM had nothing problematic to report. Using internet Explorer for looking up JDK documentation was slow scrolling and laggy. TextPad had some slowdown in typing
Filesizes
Enoding WMV (takes 5 min) @ 640x480 Standard. File size: 18.8 MB
Lossless AVI (takes 3.5 min) @ 640x480 Standard. File size: 25.5 MB
Morae Project files are larger than AVI files. Test 1 was 6 MB & Test 2 was 33 MB.
Overall performance from test cases
- Transition between windows is slow.
- Noticable slowdown when opening programs, scrolling, editing text, manipulating windows.
Concerns the group has
- Need twice the disk space for each subject if we're going to encode to avi or wmv.
- How much lag is tolerable?
- How important is it to capture 30fps?
- laggy during playback and recording
- Graphics card is much too weak to power Morae recording.
- Capturing with Hi8 camera would be time consuming to convert to DV. Importing videos would also bring about problems in syncronization with Morae Manager.
Posted by Matthew at May 18, 2005 3:20 PM
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