What Digital Video Camera Do You Use?

[Turtlesboat]

Almost all the tape based camcorders now are digital, they record on mini DV tapes that you can re-use if you want to. then it's firewire or USB right into the computer. There are a couple of reasons to go tape based.

1) cost, they are cheap. Still look great but everyone wants the newest thing and the tape based camcorders can be had for pennies on the dollar.

2) I have a hard copy that I stick in a box for whatever. probably never revisit them but might be nice for future generations to view after I'm dead.

3) while HD is nice to watch, It's still not practical to edit unless you have a bunch of money to plunk down on a really nice expensive computer and software. Remember, all of those DVD's you watch are standard definition.

4) most of the camcorders now will shoot in 16x9 either anamorphic or native. looks great. most of my videos are for web or I burn to DVD (all standard definition right now) and I can share them with family. while HD looks great, most of us can only watch it coming directly out of the camcorder. not an easy way to share that HD footage.

I've shot lots and lots of video and have had a couple of short films I made shown on IFC (the independent film channel) and i've only ever used MiniDV camcorders. I also author DVD's as part of my work and almost all are standard definition films.

bang for buck=miniDV
speed=hard drive or DVD recording
High Definition=looks great, really expensive, hard to share with anyone (have to convert to standard definition to make DVD's), usually has much better still capability but still not as good as a dedicated still camera.

Like they say in the industry "it's not the camera, it's the technique" a good tripod, lighting, editing.

 

[First Born]

Wesley, your going to need that camera when you have the real "First Born"!

Don't let her hear you say that, she does not like it. She is the real and only first born and we will not tell her any different until it is time. :thumbsup: Although it would be nice to say I got the camcorder to record delivery of second child, we are just not ready to handle the expenses of having a second child. :smt043Camcorder arrived today and I have got a lot of learning to do.

 

[Nehalennia]

Bolt man, I agree that the disc units are nice so you can simply throw the disc in a safe or box to store, but that is why I have the external Hard drive for our camera. I have all the imported footage from the Camera in vdeo files and if My Puter pukes, I just connect the EHD to a new Puter and viola...

 

[wish2fish]

Bolt man, I agree that the disc units are nice so you can simply throw the disc in a safe or box to store, but that is why I have the external Hard drive for our camera. I have all the imported footage from the Camera in vdeo files and if My Puter pukes, I just connect the EHD to a new Puter and viola...

but what if the EHD dies?

 

[Nehalennia]

but what if the EHD dies?

or you step on your DVD?
Usually I have "produced" the movie and burned it onto a DVD to watch or mail to share with relatives. But yes I think any media has is risks for damage. To me it seemed logical to not have to bring along more tapes or discs, just batteries and and way to charge them.
With 7 hours of capacity that's more than plenty for a long trip.

 

[wish2fish]

Todd,
for my photos I have on them hard drive and also burn to a disk by year.

 

[Nehalennia]

I have two external hard drives. 1 for music (120GB)and the other(300GB) for Docs, My Pictures and Videos.
The computer 2004 vintage HP has a 100GB HD I think, for all programs

 

[billandamy]

Sony handycam dcr-hc21

Purchased 2 years ago for the birth of the 3rd child when the previous vid camera was left outside in the rain after filming the other 2 children a couple of weeks earlier :thumbsup:

Mini dv set up which I love. Simple to use, and works as seamlessly with iMovie and other mac applications as disk or hard drive type units. You will need a fire wire cable for best results.

Be careful how much you want to spend on such things if you are like me. I never get anything more than middle of the road, because, well, Ill end up leaving it outside, drop it down the stairs, drop it in the snow, forget it is in my winter coat pocket and put it away for the other seasons and assume it is lost and go buy another one (yea, that happened a few years ago and gave the second one to my brother)....

 

[fc3]

Depends on what you want to do.

Most of the camcorders on the market are standard definition models. That is, they record in 640x480 mode, or 704x480 mode depending on the aspect ration. Normal aspect ratio is 4:3, wide screen is 16:9. Sort of. It's actually a bit more complicated that that, but that's close enough for this discussion. That said, standard def is on its way out. Anyone who has compared the picture quality of HD programming to SD programming can see why.

So, the obvious answer is to go hi-def for better quality, especially if you already have an HD TV set. Right? Well, not so fast!

We're in a transitional period between SD and HD. We're not at HD nirvana, yet. There are a couple of factions battling it out right now. First of all, there's Toshiba fighting the BluRay camp for the next generation of video disk player / recorder. And there's a lot of FUD going on around that situation. There are others in the marketplace who don't want any next-generation player to succeed. Guys like Micro$oft and Apple want the next generation to be downloaded movies, not rentable discs. But, one asks, how are they going to push HD content down the 'net? Good question; no answer. Do they expect people to download less than SD quality movies from iTunes to watch on a HDTV that cost a couple of grand? I don't think the MP3 experience of people buying less than CD quality music is going to play in video. But I could be wrong. Anyway, the player format war is affecting the camcorder marketplace to some extent. A bit more on that later.

There are multiple standards for HD video. Basically, for consumers it boils down to HDV and AVCHD. HDV is an extension built on top of DV. The common consumer Mini DV tapes are one version of DV. It uses the same tapes and such. The data rate is limited to the DV data rate, so the best you'll see is about 25 Mbps for 1080i. To squish MPEG2 1080i down to 25 Mbps, they do a lot of interframe compression. Standard def DV uses only I frames. Each frame stands on its own. HDV uses GOP (Group Of Pictures, not Grand Old Party) encoding, which uses not only I frames, but also B frames and P frames. Editing is harder since the editing software has to work with a bunch of frames at once in order to cut and paste clips. MPEG 2 is also a bit of a data pig. It takes a lot of data to get a decent picture. There are two variants of HDV. HDV1 is 720p @ 19Mbps. HDV2 is 1080i @ 25 Mbps. HDV1 uses square pixels, HDV2 uses oblong ones. I'm not going to get into the square vs. oblong pixel arguments here. Look at some playbacks on an HDTV and make your own decision.

AVCHD is based on MPEG 4's AVC H.264 codec. It's the same format as supported in the BluRay players, so transfer from camcorder to media should be simple. AVC also delivers a better picture with a lower data rate. 1080P can be shot and stored with AVCHD. The downside of AVCHD right now is that manufacturers are concentrating on recording time rather than video quality. So the data rates are a bit on the low side of what they should be. So while you can get 1080p, it's not great 1080p. AVCHD camcorders don't have the same image quality as the HDV units, despite HDV only supporting either 720p or 1080i. Eventually, when the available space of recording media increases, the quality of the video should go up, too, because there is more room for wider bandwidth video. The manufactures are trying to get to 1080p because customers feel that it's better and the new DVD-HD and BluRay players are native 1080p devices. So camcorder manufacturers are cutting corners in order to get that all important 1080p spec on the feature list.

In short, spending a lot of money on a camcorder right now isn't a great idea. The camcorders in the marketplace are still too compromised image quality-wise. If you already have an HD TV, and a fast computer with a lot of disk space and you can find a great deal on an HD camcorder, then it might make sense to purchase one if the amount of money that you spend is trivial enough. If you really want hi-def, consider HDV over AVCHD for the next year or so. They offer pretty darned good HD images and editing has been pretty well worked out. Apple's Final Cut Pro does a very good job editing HDV and it works fine just just a MacBook Pro or iMac, you don't need a dual quad-core Mac Pro. Otherwise, get a standard def unit that has the best image quality available. There are a number of sites that review these things. Camcorderinfo.com is one. There are others. Again, don't spend a lot, since basically, the unit is already obsolete. Buy image quality, not a laundry list of features. Whatever you get, you'll be able to render out video to standard DVD formatted MPEG-2. If you get either an HDV or AVCHD unit, you'll also be able to render out HD video for either BluRay, HD-DVD, or downloadable formats.

Best regards,
Frank

 

[dpvandy01]

Not to hijack the thread but can anyone tell me why a minolta SLR lens wont fit a cannon SLR camera? I thought all SLR's had a standard lens and body ....

thanx

Rob

I think the Minolta drive motor for the auto focus is in the body and the cannon's drive motor is in the lense. At least that was the case when I bought a 35mm Minolta 5XI.. That's also why the Minolta's lenses were cheaper...