Camcorder Questions & Compatibility

I'm looking to get a new video camera since my wife is due to have our first child in September. I've got a 2.5 year old macbook pro that I don't plan on replacing anytime soon since it still runs like new.

I'm sitting on the fence in regards to buying an HD camcorder versus an SD camcorder.

Why to get the SD: I do not have a blue ray burner nor do I have a blue ray player. The only way to enjoy the movies in HD right now would be to hook the camcorder directly up to the TV. I would eventually fill all available memory on the camera and have to dump it at some point. SD cameras are also much cheaper.

Why to get the HD: They are cheaper now than when I first started looking at them about a year ago when my wife and I started trying for a baby. Still, they are more expensive and considering I just dropped $1000 for baby furniture yesterday, still have alot more to buy for the kid, and am paying tuition for my master's, any savings would be nice. Also, while I do not have a blue ray burner now, I will at some point down the road and it would be nice to have HD quality saved on the computer to be burned whenever that day comes. I also feel like buying an SD camcorder is buying obsolete technology.

Now that I've unloaded all that I have two questions:

1. Which seems to be the smarter decision? Right now I think I'm leaning towards the HD camcorder because the ones I'm looking at are only $600...which would only be about $200 more than the SD models I'm looking at.

2. What recording format would be easiest to edit in iMovie? I was looking at one HD camcorder (a JVC), that recorded in MPEG-2 and judging from consumer reviews I don't want that. The one I'm leaning towards now is the Panasonic HDC-HS100. It records in AVCHD. Would that be easy to work with?

The recording format is my most pressing concern. Which is the easiest to work with? Which is the hardest?

TIA!

I can give you a hand here. I am also delving into videography, and have done a few projects at church and family/friends' functions/parties, etc... I have a Panasonic HDC-SD9, which is AVCHD, flash-based, and was $599 last September at Best Buy. This is a great camcorder that has faboo HD quality. It only shoots in HD (1080), so it's not going to be obsolete anytime soon.

For recording capacity, it does a fine job, as a 16GB SDHC card (get class 6, not class 4) can be had for about $30-$40, and will give you 2+ hours of recording in every setting on the cam except the highest, which will yield about 1 hour, 40 min. If you venture to get a 32GB SDHC card (maximum capacity for the camera), that effectively doubles your recording totals.

Compatibility with iMovie (08/09), FCE4, and FCP (I have all three): immediate compatibility. Here's the hook: iMovie 08/09 will pick up the cam and import any footage, no questions asked. Ditto for FCP. For Final Cut Express 4, if you want to use footage, first import into iMovie 08/09, all of your raw footage, tag it all, then export as FCE XML. *THEN* Final Cut Express will import (remember, you won't have any edited footage yet) and then you can edit/trim/transish, etc., to your heart's content.

Thoughts on brands/models of camcorder (within the $600 plateau): the aforementioned Panasonic HDC-SD9; the Canon HF10 (I just bought one last night and unpacked and studying up today; it's only advantage over the Panasonic is that it has an accessory shoe for a light or mic, but at a premium because it still retails between $800 and $1000, depending on where you get it); and other models from Panasonic and Canon that have replaced these 2008's. But to be honest, I'd stay away from JVC, Samsung, and Sony, as they are not as Mac-friendly as the Canon and Panasonic are.

To give you an idea, with very little idea of what my finished product would be, I shot about 15 minutes of footage of a dedication ceremony at my church, which included the ceremony, some establishing/stock shots, and some detail shots, then imported into iMovie 08, edited, added titles, transitions, and music, and exported to iDVD. The total time it took to edit, trans, and add music was 45 minutes (partly because I'm a sorta perfectionist), then encoding and burning in iDVD took about an hour. Total time for the whole, final, 10-minute video was 15 minutes to shoot, and 2 hours to sit and edit, get creative, encode and burn. Once you have one DVD mastered, additional copies take about 7-10 minutes.

Hope all this long-windedness helped.
Cheers!

I think you should go for the HD. Like you said the cost is constantly dropping to where exceptional pieces of equipment are incredibly affordable. My fiancée decided she wants to come on board with my film business so she invested in her own camera (just a Canon HV30 to start out with, my EX-1 is the main camera) and her camera's quality is AMAZING. She bought an entire kit off eBay which also included a hard case, soft case, a couple of lens accesories, tripod, A/C charger, battery and 3 tapes for under $700 shipped. It was a great deal.

I personally don't think it matters if you don't have a blu-ray player. I don't and I shoot in 1080p true HD... my TV isn't even high definition, but the point is the footage is so eventually when you invest in an HD TV then you're footage already looks great and will just look that much greater.

The choice is yours, but I would highly recommend going for an inexpensive consumer-level HD camera like the Canon. As someone who's been in the videography business for a few years now I've used my share of SD and HD cameras, and regardless of what type of TV the end product will be playing on, the HD footage will always look better. The colors are more crisp, vibrant and true and the overall clarity is incredible.

Good luck with your decision!

Thanks a ton for the help. It'll be a few months before I get one so I've got plenty of time to mull it over.

You'll save all your stuff on external hard drives, which are getting cheaper and cheaper. You can also use an Apple TV to view your stuff in full rez HD via iTunes, as an option. And, you can always take your HD stuff out to SD DVD, not a big deal, and it'll still look better than if you'd had shot on SD.

Sexy Patrol said:

I think you should go for the HD. Like you said the cost is constantly dropping to where exceptional pieces of equipment are incredibly affordable. My fiancée decided she wants to come on board with my film business so she invested in her own camera (just a Canon HV30 to start out with, my EX-1 is the main camera) and her camera's quality is AMAZING.

Click to expand...

I am also thinking about purchasing a Canon HV30 as my first-ever camcorder, and I have a question that I'm hoping you can answer.

Say I download my video to my new iMac and then use iMovie '09 to do some editing. Now I want to watch this edited video on my HDTV. How do I do this? Do I upload the edited video back to a new tape on my camcorder, or do I burn a DVD containing the edited video? Will the edited video still be HD?

And what if instead I purchase a flash camcorder (e.g., Canon HF20).........same question. Can I upload edited video back to my camcorder or do I burn a DVD?

Or maybe there is yet a better way of doing this.....like I said, this will be my first camcorder.

Thanks for any help you can give me..........

Some notes for you all:

1) HD Footage is beautiful. And from everything I've seen (including my own footage), it tends to resize better, be sharper and have better colors (when done right) to SD rather then native SD footage (like footage from a standard DV camcorder)

2) HD footage, when output from your editor in HD is HD. So, if you have a video that's 720p, and you output to a mp4 using .h264 with a config for 720p, then that file, when played will be 720p

3) HD footage can not be saved and played back on a standard dvd UNLESS it's recorded as an AVCHD DVD - at which point a standard dvd player won't be able to play it back, instead you'll need a bluray player capable of playing AVCHD discs (ie: PS3). AVCHD is a specialized and highly compressed HD format. Amount you can fit on a single dvd will depend on your compression settings. I've seen as much as an hour on a single dvd and still look good, and I've seen some footage not look good if it's longer then 10 minutes. A lot depends on the software you use and the quality and type of original footage (ie: a lot of quickly changing scenery tends to not play well with lots of compression)

4) Unless the camcorder supports the format that you export in, you can't just throw the footage back on the camcorder and expect it to be playable by the camcorder. You would have to make the file format, location, structure, etc. all correct to be playable on a hard drive or flash based camera. Caveat: There are HDV camcorders that use tape based media where you could potentially export it back to the tape and then play it from the camera (assuming the camera supports recording from firewire)

5) HD camcorders are generally very sharp. This has one negative - it's much less forgiving of bad camera handling. So if you shake a lot, it'll show. If you manual focus and you're off, it'll show; etc. I'd definitely look for a camera with, preferably, optical image stabilization and if you can't get that - at least electronic image stabilization. Even if you shoot on a tripod 90% of the time, best to be prepared for that other 10%.

I am currently using a Canon HF100, I pop out my SDHC card and put it in my card reader and my final cut express imports the video just fine (no need to use imovie). YMMV as camera compatibility could be an issue. JVC seem to be some of the biggest nightmare formats as they use (if I recall correctly) some custom format.

Other tips: Whatever camcorder you look at buying, make sure it has a mic in jack. It will limit your choices down a bit, but if you ever want to use an external mic of your choosing, you'll need to have a mic in jack to do it

Get an HD camcorder, you won't be disappointed - plus it will give you more breathing room as you want to move into more HD. It's a lot easier to downsize a piece of footage from HD to SD and it look awesome then it is to attempt to go from SD to HD.

Nethfel said:

HD footage can not be saved and played back on a standard dvd UNLESS it's recorded as an AVCHD DVD - at which point a standard dvd player won't be able to play it back, instead you'll need a bluray player capable of playing AVCHD discs (ie: PS3).

Click to expand...

Thanks for all the info. But I have a follow-up question. If I don't have a blueray player, can I still burn a DVD in SD format? If so, would the images on this SD DVD be sharper/better than what I would have if I simply used an SD camcorder?

One of my reasons for burning DVDs of my edited videos would be to share same with family members. Even if I have an AVCHD-capable blueray player, chances are some of them won't. So is it just simpler to get an SD camcorder?

CactusVideoGuy said:

To give you an idea, with very little idea of what my finished product would be, I shot about 15 minutes of footage of a dedication ceremony at my church, which included the ceremony, some establishing/stock shots, and some detail shots, then imported into iMovie 08, edited, added titles, transitions, and music, and exported to iDVD. The total time it took to edit, trans, and add music was 45 minutes (partly because I'm a sorta perfectionist), then encoding and burning in iDVD took about an hour. Total time for the whole, final, 10-minute video was 15 minutes to shoot, and 2 hours to sit and edit, get creative, encode and burn. Once you have one DVD mastered, additional copies take about 7-10 minutes.

Click to expand...

I have a question related to the DVD that you burned. Since you said you didn't have a blueray recorder, I assume the resulting DVD was not HD. Is that correct? If so, then was the video on your DVD of better quality than if you had merely used an SD camcorder?

I want to use my camcorder (yet to be purchased) to generate DVDs to send to family members, most of whom, like me, do not have blueray recorders. So I am beginning to think that I am better off with just an inexpensive SD camcorder.

Would appreciate your input/comments..........

You can still burn to SD, you just output from your editor into the appropriate format; you can even edit with HD footage on an SD sequence.

Here's what I've found that works for me:

These settings are for final cut express; I'm sure you can do similar in imovie, but I don't know how.

Source:
HD1920x1080i (on my camera this yields the best picture and has the highest recording bitrate, any bitrate below the highest setting reverts to 1440x1080i)

Destination:

720p or letterbox SD - edit on a 1080i setup sequence, export to 720p or letterbox SD with appropriate settings and a good bitrate. If you set the bitrate too low, you'll end up with crap (like the default setting in FCE is 256kbit/s which is just stupid because the quality is terrible, I usually set mine to about 4500@720p for comp playback because I haven't seen any real artifacts; higher if there's a lot of movement which isn't a problem for most of my subjects)

non-letterbox SD (not including anamorphic which I haven't tried yet) - if using fce, edit using a sequence setup to output to NTSC DV/4:3, then position the video so what you want in frame is in frame on the screen (since 1080i is usually widescreen unless you're recording in 1440x1080i which is 4:3)

SD Anamorphic - I haven't tried yet.

These are my own experiences - I am by no means an export master, I had done a lot of reading on different sites to try to understand it. A good place to read about it is dvcreators.net - they have an ilife topic area if you plan to use imovie. Since I currently use FCE with plans to use FCP, I do a lot of reading in those areas to see how others do their work. You may have to do some trial an error to get settings that are just right for you.

Thank you for this question and these answers! It is exactly what I was looking for.

durango said:

Thanks for all the info. But I have a follow-up question. If I don't have a blueray player, can I still burn a DVD in SD format?

Click to expand...

Yes, iDVD will down rez your HD to SD, and do a really fine job of it!

I'm an FCP trainer, and the best way using FCP is to edit your HD in it's native HD codec, then do the down conversion to SD when you go out to Compressor to make your DVD files for DVDSP. Or let iDVD do the conversion. Dropping HD footage into an FCP SD Sequence is just a bad idea, trust me.

Getting HD into FC Express

This message string is rather old, but since I found myself reading it, others might as well.
I had a terrible time figuring out how to get files from my Canon Vixia into FC Express. I tried many permutations using "import" (since I couldn't get anywhere with "capture".)
THEN, elsewhere on this wonderful forum, I found a simple explanation. Use "log and transfer." Suddenly instant camera recognition and 2 clicks to import. The HD looked good in FC Express. I had to export in SD, but it's still much better than my old DV tape camcorder.
FCE is a big program for amateurs, and I didn't know that corner. Thanks to Mac-Forums.