Dec
06
What’s the best HD camcorder for my situation?
By
mauriziocorso77 asked:
I use premiere pro cs4 and have a macbook pro (Core2Duo, 2gb ram).
I want a HD camcorder but am not sure about the format I should go for.
AVCHD sounds like it’s too hard to edit but HDV sounds very compatible. However the ease of hard-drive or flash based media sounds very enticing to me.
Compatibility with boot camp is more important than mac.
Panasonic HD Camcorders
I use premiere pro cs4 and have a macbook pro (Core2Duo, 2gb ram).
I want a HD camcorder but am not sure about the format I should go for.
AVCHD sounds like it’s too hard to edit but HDV sounds very compatible. However the ease of hard-drive or flash based media sounds very enticing to me.
Compatibility with boot camp is more important than mac.
Panasonic HD Camcorders
Flip Video HD Camcorders
avchd , and HDV are the same for the ease of editing. the best HD camera can be whatever you choose , the format and the uses from sd and hard drive based camera’s are getting hard to see the difference in features between them , I think if you chose some thing which you trust you will get the results expected
Canon HD Camcorders
I agree with pureinsomniac to a point.
Your computer should do fine with either HDV or AVCHD compressed video, but we need to dive deeper.
With AVCHD video, you copy the files over a USB connection from camcorder to Mac (external drive preferred). When you import the video it is decompressed. With HDV, you connect with a firewire cable and while importing, the video is decompressed.
AVCHD has different compression settings within that MTS envelope. If you stay with a newer camcorder that does the higher 24mbps stream, then you are closer to HDV’s 25mbps. In this case higher is better. With video compression, that means discarded video data… That compression is OK for a LAST step in the process, but as a firs step, everything else downstream is limited to that first compression quality.
When you fill the hard drive in the camcorder, what do you do? When you break the camcorder and the video is still on the hard drive, what do you do? When the camcorder is stolen and the video is still on the hard drive, what do you do? When you want to watch the finished project in high definition, what do you do? What is your plan to archive the video you capture?
With miniDV tape, carry extras. One fills, pop it out, pop in a new one. I can be shooting again in about 8 seconds. Mark and lock the full one. If the camcorder is broken, get that last tape out and use another similar camcorder. If the camcorder is stolen, I am out ONLY what is on that tape – not everything else. You can export the finished project from the computer back to the camcorder and use the camcorder (connected using component + audio cables or HDMI) to a HDTV and use the camcorder as a playback deck – AND that export (and the capture tapes) are your archive – I never reuse tapes. MiniDV tapes are cheap – the 60 minute regular ones are all you need – at about $3 each and able to store the equivalent of 44 gig (that is 63 minutes of HDV), they are the least expensive archive and capture media available.
Boot Camp should not matter if your Windows preferences are set correctly and the firewire port is active. And if you like CS4, you’ll love FinalCut.
The reason you want an external drive is so the internal start up drive and the virtual memory use are not slowing you because the hard drive head is working both. With the external drive, it is responsible for taking care of the video files read-write and the internal drive is responsible for the operating system housekeeping. If you can up the RAM to 4 gig, that would help (especially for the AVCHD files). AND especially if you are running Windows and trying to edit AVCHD or HDV. On the other hand, 2 gig is fine (though 4 gig is better) if you are editing HDV in MacOS.