Viz Vocus | Out-of-the-box-technology

Quick Tips

How to clean the lenses?: Good quality of video can be only be achieved when all the elements contributing are completely clean. Take a few minute to clean the interchangeable lenses with a Qtips slightly dipped in Isopryl alcohol, or better, already available sterilized isopropyl clothes. Make sure it is moderately wet. The alcohol evaporates without leaving any residus.

Camera Configurations are set by default, but can be ajusted on-the-fly to reflect the lighting conditions of your operating room….
Brightness: The quality of radiance or luminosity of a visible object. Brightness can be measured as luminance (radiant energy).
Contrast: The degree of difference between light and dark extremes of color on a monitor or on printed output.
Saturation: Vividness of hue; degree of difference from a gray of the same lightness or brightness.
Sharpness: Clarity of form and detail.
Gamma: The exponent in a power-law relationship between video or pixel values and the displayed brightness.
White balance: A processing operation performed to ensure proper color fidelity in a captured digital camera image.

Email

For technical inquiries, please contact us via email at support@vizvocus.com.

A member of the Technical Support Team will get back to you within 24 hours.

Phone

You want to speak with a member of the Technical Support Team?

Our department is open Monday to Friday, from 9:00AM to 5:00PM (Eastern Time). Outside the business hours, you are invited to leave a message on our voice mail or to send your queries by fax.

Frequently Asked Questions

Any questions on how to optimize the use of the VizVOCUS Digital Camera System? This section is there to help you!

How to clean the lenses used with the VizVOCUS Digital Camera?

What are the effects on the video capture when the brightness, the contrast, the saturation, the sharpness and the gamma are adjusted by the user?

What is the difference between MPEG-1 and MPEG2 and MPEG-4?

What is the difference between AVI and MPEG?

Is there a way to convert an AVI file to MPEG file?

Is it possible to write to a DVD?

How to clean the lenses used with the VizVOCUS Digital Camera?

Good quality video capture will be achieved when all the elements contributing are completely clean. Take a few minutes to clean the interchangeable lenses with a cotton swab slightly dipped in Isopropyl alcohol, or better, already available sterilized isopropyl clothes. Make sure it is moderately wet. The alcohol evaporates without leaving any residues.

What are the effects on the video capture when the brightness, the contrast, the saturation, the sharpness and the gamma are adjusted by the user?

Brightness: Visual perception in which every element in an image appears to emit a given amount of light. By increasing the brightness, each element will seem to emit more light.

Contrast: The degree of difference between light and dark extremes of an image. More you increase the contrast, more the black and white will be dominant in an image. More you decrease the contrast, more middle tone colors will be dominant in an image.

Saturation: The degree of mixture of a color and white in an image. More you increase the saturation, more the white disappears and leave room to the color of an image.

Sharpness: Clarity of objects and details of an image. Decreasing the sharpness will increase the blur effect while increasing it will give the sensation that you get more details (and ultimately more “noise”) from an image.

Gamma: Measure of middle tone color brightness. Increasing gamma will increase brightness with a greater effect on middle tones.

What is MPEG?

MPEG stands for Moving Picture Expert Group. It is a CODEC (Coder/Decoder) that was originally designed to compress video and audio sequences into smaller files while attempting to preserve image and sound quality. Since the first release of the MPEG CODEC (MPEG-1) a few years ago, the technology has evolved into more accurate and efficient CODECs (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MP3). MPEG files are often represented with the ".mpg" extension.

What is the difference between MPEG-1 and MPEG2 and MPEG-4?

MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are descendants of the formal MPEG-1 video compression technology. These CODECs were developed to get higher video quality and size required today. It is easy to remember and almost accurate to say that "MPEG-2 is DVD quality video image and MPEG-1 is VCR quality".

What is MP3?

MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It is an audio compression CODEC well known from Internet users. It is possible to encode audio streams into very small files while attempting to preserve the best sound quality. MP3 files are often seen with the ".mp3" extension.

What is an AVI file?

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleaved. It is the most common format for audio and video sequences. Unlike MPEG, AVI is not a CODEC but rather a container developed by Microsoft to concatenate video and audio streams encoded with different CODECs into the same file. As an example, an AVI file may contain an MPEG-2 video stream combined with a MP3 audio stream. The result is an audio/video file with the ".avi" extension that can be played on any machine where the required CODECs are installed.

What is the difference between AVI and MPEG?

MPEG is a CODEC used for audio and video compression or decompression while AVI is more like a container. An AVI file may contain streams compressed with any CODECs, including MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 and MP3.

Note about compression.

Uncompressed video sequences are often used for edition while compressed video sequences are used mainly in distribution of video content. In general, the quality of a video sequence lowers when the compression is increased. Each different audio and video compression technology exposes different advantages and inconvenient. It is often necessary to make some tests in order to determine which technology will give the best results.

Is there a way to convert an AVI file to MPEG file?

Many software are available on the internet for that purpose. It is almost always possible to convert from a format to any other, but different software may be required to achieve different types of conversion. Note that most conversions will require recompression of the streams and that it may be very time consuming without the appropriate hardware.

What is MJPEG?

MJPEG stands for Motion JPEG. It is a CODEC based on the well known JPEG picture format. JPEG images are often seen with the ".jpg" or ".jpeg" extension. MJPEG video streams are in fact a succession of multiple individually encoded JPEG pictures.

What are VCD and SVCD?

VCD and SVCD respectively stand for Video Compact Disc and Super Video Compact Disc. Basically it is a CD that contains an MPEG encoded audio/video stream. Like any other CDs, VCDs and SVCDs can hold up to 700MB of data. SVCDs are the latest technology and are better in term of quality than VCDs but are way less compatible. VCDs can be played on most DVD players while SVCDs can only be played on a small selection of high-end DVD players.

What is a DVD?

DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc. It is commonly used to distribute high quality video content such as movies.

Is it possible to write to a DVD?

No, a DVD is a read-only media. However, there are different recordable medias available: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM. DVD burners are designed to write to one or more of these media formats. It is important to ensure that your media is compatible with both the DVD burner and the DVD player. As an example, a DVD player that supports DVD and DVD-R discs will not be able to read DVD-RAM discs. Similarly, a DVD-R burner won't be able to write to DVD+R medias.