BTV Pro has all the features of BTV in addition to those described below. To see an overview of BTV, click here.

There is a detailed user manual for BTV Pro included in the software download. This page provides just a brief overview of the main features.

Description

BTV Pro is an application for the Macintosh that allows you to view, capture and edit video, and create stop-motion animations. It also has advanced capture features such as time lapse, motion detection, and DV input/output. It works with any Macintosh compatible video input source such as video input cards, TV cards, built-in video, USB, DV, and FireWire video sources.

BTV Pro is available as a classic application for Mac OS 8 and 9, and also a Carbonized application that runs natively under Mac OSX (the Carbon version also runs under Mac OS 8.6 or later with CarbonLib).

Overview of the Main Features

Viewing video, video and image capture and channel changing are all explained in the BTV Overview section.

Movie playback and editing

Once you have captured a movie you can open it in BTV Pro for playback and editing. Movies are displayed in their own windows with a standard QuickTime controller bar:

The movie can be played back either in its window, or full screen on the entire monitor.

You can use the controller bar to select portions of the movie and simple copy-and-paste or click-and-drag operations to edit the movie. You can also open image files and add them to the movie, or easily add frames from the video input.

There is an optional floating window that displays movie time code and frame count. This information is updated as the movie plays, and new values can be entered to jump to a particular point in the movie:

Exporting movies

You can use BTV Pro's movie export feature to recompress the movie using different compression settings, adjust the frame rate, temporal compression, sound settings, and also add filters (for example sharpen, emboss, grain, colour balance, blur, etc).

The export feature can also be used to produce a DV stream, to extract the video or sound track, to create separate image files from a movie, or to created a hinted movie file suitable for streaming.

Stop-motion animation

BTV Pro has many features for creating stop motion animations. You can capture individual image files (BTV Pro will save and number them automatically as you go) and then compose them all into a movie later.

Or you can create a new movie and add individual frames to it, and instantly play back and edit what you have created. There is also an onion skin feature available that displays the last captured frame over the current video input so that you can accurately see changes between frames.

There is a floating window on hand that helps you keep track on the number of frames you are capturing:

DV video input/output

BTV Pro has extensive features for capture and output of DV video:

DV device control

BTV Pro includes full DV device control via a floating window:

Frame averaging
To create a noise-free image, the frame averaging feature takes a number of frames from the video input and averages them together to produce a single image. This can significantly reduce, or even eliminate, the noise in the video signal. This works because the image is constant but the noise is quickly varying so over several frames it averages to zero.
This is useful in a number of situations such as capturing noise-free still images from a digital camera, capturing clean images from a noisy VHS video, or even to remove a moving element in a video sequence. See the following example of noise removal:
Noisy frame of video	Averaged over 40 frames

Time lapse capture

The time lapse feature is useful for scheduling the capture of many frames over a period of time, giving precise control over frequency and duration of the capture. For example this feature could be used to record a movie of the sunrise by capturing a frame every few seconds for the duration of the sunrise, or it could be useful for quickly creating an animation.

Motion detection

This feature constantly analyses the video input and will only capture video when there is motion. The settings are fully adjustable so that it can be used with a variety of different subjects:

Folder Viewer

BTV Pro has a built in Folder Viewer feature that allows you to view resizable thumbnails of all the image files in a folder. You can then rename and delete the files straight from the Folder Viewer. This is a very useful tool for managing large numbers of images files.

AppleScript

In addition to the basic AppleScript commands described in the BTV Overview section, BTV Pro has commands to control movie playback, output to FireWire, adding frames to a movie, and more.