I had a chat the other afternoon with Bernie Goldbach about video and digital camcorders. Bernie pointed me in the direction of a camera which he thought cost a few hundred dollars, but it turns out he’d left out a zero!
Since I’m heading off to Sydney in June for a couple of weeks I’d really like to be able to video some of the sights etc., but I’m at a total loss when it comes to choosing the “right” camera.
What am I looking for?
I’m not 100% sure, but I have a few ideas.
It needs to have a reasonable number of inputs / outputs, as I don’t want to be too constrained. I’ll be editing / processing footage on a Mac.
I want to avoid proprietary formats.
Optical zoom is essential. Digital zoom is nice and all, but I know from still cameras that you really need proper optical zoom.
I’m not overly concerned about the storage format, though proprietary is “out”.
Battery life – better would be preferable
Size – smaller is better. Apart from anything else I don’t want to carry extra weight.
In terms of budget.. I’ve no idea how much I want to spend, but ideally below 1000 euro. I’m not interested in getting a “cheap and nasty” camera, as that’s a false economy.
So can anyone make any sane (or insane) recommendations?
I currently have a nice JVC hard drive camcorder with a microSDHC slot for expansion.
It’s cheap, small, light, good quality, and has 35x optical zoom. There’s just one problem… The files are MOD files, but they’re actually just MPEGs with a different extension, however just changing the extension to MPEG doesn’t play nice with Windows… anything, but works fine with VLC, I can’t comment on iMovie (or any other Mac software) compatibility. However, I’m making the switch next week, so I can report back then
In the meantime, here’s a link to it on Pixmania:
http://www.pixmania.ie/ie/uk/755502/art/jvc/gz-mg330-camcorder-silver.html
Michele,
I have a JVC Everio and I love it, but its a complete pig to use on the Mac. The default .MOD format doesn’t work with any of the Mac tools and requires conversion with the excellent ffmpegx tool which is a pain.
I’ve got excellent results with the video mode on canon still cameras (they produce .AVI files which everyone likes) and I know @ghook loves his Sony video recorder.
I’ve found a couple of different solutions for MOD files in iMovie.
Apparently, if you just import them straight from your camcorder into iMovie, it works fine.
If you’ve already taken the videos off the camcorder and you have an external hard drive you can simulate this by putting all your MOD files (changed to MPG extensions) into a folder called “Mp_root” on your ext. hard drive’s root, and all apparently goes grand
Panasonic HDC-SD9 10x optical zoom SDHC and around £365UK
the HDC-SD20 is similar but has 16 optical zoom £400 UK
Martin
Which formats do those use? I really don’t want to end up in format hell as described by previous commenters 🙂
Michele
got the exact same as Joe Drumgoole… works a treat. quite nifty and tied in with vimeo… pretty handy.
records in AVCHD format.