Saturday 7 May 2011

MD80 camcorder instructions for removal of time stamp

MD80 as it is best well known is a tiny DV DVR camera that comes with many different names under many different brands and the only difference appears to be the price in many models, I purchased my MD80 for just under £16 which included a free micro SD card and card reader.

These cameras can be used for many things including sports and may also come in handy if you are hoping to be the next James Bond, but you may think what you have recorded have been spoilt by some giant yellow time stamp in the bottom right hand corner of the video, well what I will try to do here is make these instructions very simple so that almost everyone should be able to follow my insutructions and be able to successfully remove that time stamp

Step 1: So here is the first of many steps, just follow each step and skip no steps at all. Firstly you will want to get that video off the Micro SD card so plug the card into a USB card reader and the card should now appear as a removable disk with a capital letter assigned to it. Now you want to open that up and once that is opened you will want to go through some other folders named DCIM and 100MEDIA to find all the video files you have recorded

Step 2: Once you are in the 100MEDIA folder you want to select whatever video file you want and copy and  paste it or drag it to a suitable folder or to the desktop

Step 3: You now need an application Called VirtualDub which you can download by clicking here, once you have downloaded VirtualDub extract the contents of the the archive to a suitable folder or you could extract the files to the desktop but it will make the desktop look messy. Now once you have extracted that archive to a suitable location open up the folder named plugins

Step 4: Now you want to download a VirtualDub plugin to put in the plugins folder, so download this plugin named Logoaway and copy it to the plugins folder

Step 5: Now open up VirtualDub by clicking on the VirtualDub icon and not vdub and once it has been opened click on File and after that click on Open video file or press Ctrl and O on the keyboard at the same time. Now you want to browse to where that video file is and open it in VirtualDub

Step 6: Once video file is loaded, in VirtualDub hold down Ctrl and F on the keyboard to open up Filters, once the box pops up click Add and now click Load and now browse to where the plugins folder is located and open logoaway.vdf. Now scroll down the list of filters, click on logoaway v4.01 and now click OK

Step 7: Logoaway configuration should now have loaded so now what you want to do is first click Show preview and click one of the large buttons named XY. and now you want to adjust the values for the logo border positioning and the logo border size, for the logo border position I use 325 for X and 445 for Y and for logo border size I use a width of 370 and a height of 35. Once all those adjustments are made you can adjust the sliders for Blur power and X-Y weight to whatever you think looks best, if you can not decide yourself you could try just having both sliders positioned in the middle. Now all is done and you now want to click OK to close the configuration window and click OK again on the next window

Step 8: Now click File and look for Save as AVI, click that and save the video file. Warning, the file size of the output video will be huge and you will want a video converter to convert the video to a suitable size

Step 9: The following steps are now optional, what you will now want to do is download a video converter, this one right here is free with no catches and is a very useful and simple video converter that I use regularly

Step 10: If you have downloaded Freemake Video Converter and still need help read on. Now what you want to do once the video converter is installed is open it up and simply drag and drop a video file into the main window. Once that is done it is now time to click one of those large buttons at the bottom. For today click on the button named to AVI and now you can select many presets, for today just leave it as DVD Quality and select where to save to and now click on Convert and once conversion is complete we are complete for todays guide on how to remove a time stamp from those videos

Now all you have to do is upload the video to YouTube or do whatever else you want to do with it.

I hope you found this guide useful, I am sure you found moments where it dragged on but my aim was to make a guide everyone could understand and follow and I hope I achieved that today so if I have helped you please let me know and if you want to use this guide on another website please let me know and I will be happy for you to use it if you ask me first

15 comments:

  1. Thanks for your comment on md80instructions.co.uk
    I've linked to this page on my Useful Links page.
    Cheers!
    Dave

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  2. hi,
    just a little question: your way to do it does work with Mac osx?
    thanks

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  3. Thanks for the tip I found it worked very well. To avoid the huge file size, I would avoid not use uncompressed output and instead use DivX or MPEG, which is what you have to do anyway, if you plan on making a DVD or watching on various media players. It does not add much onto the overall encoding time of the logo filter either.

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  4. Hello, I got this camera from Ebay for £3.45 + p&p, but the little CD ROM was unreadable, can you direct me to a D/Load site for the software? I sussed out how to use it, but would like the software if it's available....

    Thanx

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  5. Hi. Can you get VirtualDub for Mac? or something similiar so I can remove date and time? Cheers

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  6. So... is it not possible to stop the camera from putting the timestamp on the AVI in the first place?

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  7. hi no there is not as virtualdub available for mac, closest alternative is avidemux as i found out by googling

    and no you can not stop it in the first place, there probably is a way but would most likely involve taking it apart and fiddling around with things

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  8. How can i get my md80 to make complete videos without stoping and restarting

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    Replies
    1. try a good microsd card i mean class10
      i have one samsung 8 gb class 10 and it works fine
      zenan

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  9. thanks for the tutorial it works quite good.
    for a camara off this class i think thats enough
    thank you very much for your patiente
    zenan

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  10. Hi,

    I bought an MD80 clone from this seller

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/200761386422?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649

    The problem is that the video looks like in zoom mode. In order to get the object in frame I have to move far away and something else that get the appearance to be in zoom mode is that even with a minute movement the video image is very shaky. I now that the camera doesn't have image stabilization but the shakiness is very strong. Any idea how to fix it?

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  11. The problem is that the video looks like in zoom mode. In order to get the object in frame I have to move far away and something else that get the appearance to be in zoom mode is that even with a minute movement the video image is very shaky. I now that the camera doesn't have image stabilization but the shakiness is very strong. Any idea how to fix it?
    Reply

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  12. i have some probleme itz zoom mode its very near ,plz help and fix want normal with out zoom

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cheap magnetic & Gel type wide angle lens available on ebay !

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  13. Thank you I found this very helpful :)

    ReplyDelete