a few relatively dumb questions about camcorders....
Dear Debianists,
I am interested to get a camcorder and use it along with Debian.....
I got myself a copy of Digital Video Oct 2007 magazine. In there is a useful
review of a wide range of camcorders.
The general picture I get from reading the magazine and various web pages
and av forum pages is that people seem to think that mini DV is the better
format for relatively low priced camcorders.
Hard Disk ones work OK but the quality is not quite as good as tape cameras
at the same price.
You can also get DVD camcorders. They have a DVD disk in there that is
smaller than a regular DVD that you would use e.g. to install Debian with,
but conventional DVD optical drives can apparently read these smaller video
DVD disks.
Again the magazine and web pages seem to say that the quality of the DVD
camcorders are not quite as good quality at a given price in the budget
range as mini DV camcorders.
I guess the advantage of the DVD and hard disk cameras would be one of
convenience in that you could transfer footage to the computer hard drive
very quickly and without fuss.
If you want to copy the footage to the computer from the mini DV tape
camcorder you apparently have to use a firewire cable. I assume this means
that I will have to attach a firewire card to my PC..... There is an IEEE
1394 connector on the board apparently. I am using an AMD64 box with an
AMD64 Sempron 3200 chip and a socket AM2 board I got from novatech......
It also has PCI and PCI Express slots in it.
It is the K8M890M2M4 motherboard sold by Novatech to be precise.
I don't have a graphics card yet but I will get one soon.
In the buyer's guide in the Digital Video magazine (published by Future
Publishing who also produce the Linux Format magazine) the editor's choice
for a camcorder in my price range is a miniDV camcorder made by JVC. The
model is the JVC GR-D340. It retails for around £300 ($600). You can get
it at a discount on the internet (£200).
Apparently it has a selection of automatic exposure modes, wipes, fades and
16:9 shooting. As far as I understand it the 16:9 mode is for widescreen
TVs.
It also has a 32x optical zoom. The audio performance is also good and so
is picture quality. It got an overall rating of 94%.
I think I would buy this camera...... However, I went into Curry's
electrical store at the weekend and they had a camcorder which had 3CCD
technology in it that was retailing for around £200...............
The guy in the shop said this was superior to single CCD camera technology.
Am I missing out here?
In practice, is it a pain having to copy tapes slowly for an hour etc or so
through the firewire on to the computer?
Are the results really that much better with the tape cameras?
In reality I would film some stuff, copy it on to the PC and edit it to add
some subtitles, some graphics and desktop software slides etc... nothing
fancy.....
Plus audio commentary. I guess that Blender could do some editing and also
graphics.
Recommendations for other software to do this would be appreciated. People
have suggested kino to me before on this list.
Comments appreciated.
Regards
Michael Fothergill
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