Advise on Digital Camera Purchase

theobick · Post by **theobick** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 4:56 am

I have been using VS 9 to edit movies from my Mini DV Camcorder. Everything works. Now I want to buy a Digital Camera; Casio, Canon or Panasonic. They all advertise high quality video but use 3 different formats: The new Casio uses MPEG4 (H.264), the Canon is AVI Motion JPEG and the Panasonic is QuickTime Motion JPEG. I would like to occasionally incorporate clips from whichever camera I buy into VS9 projects consisting mostly of Camcorder DV clips and which I like to edit in AVI mode although I suppose I could edit in MPEG 2 instead if I have to. I usually edit in AVI, then save to MPEG, then burn to DVD. Does anyone know which of the above mentioned file formats would give me the least grief and highest quality results for my projects? I don't mind converting the files over to AVI or MPEG before adding to the timeline if that is necessary. I understand from this forum that SUPER can do this for me. Is there much quality loss when this conversion is done?

Is there a format that I should absolutely avoid? I suspect that AVI motion JPEG will be the least trouble but don't really know.

Thanks

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 5:13 am

I suspect you are right too! Motion JPEG (or MJPEG) was the forerunner to DV/AVI. It is high quality, but has little compression. The downside on a still camera is that the files are huge so you can't fit much on an SD or whatever card the camera uses. With either the AVI version or QT version, you should get the codec on the disc with the camera, so you have to download that. QT is just a carrier/wrapper format like AVI in this case. It's just that a lot of people have had a lot of trouble with other formats which use QT's .MOV extensio, so my preference would go to the AVI version.

The H.264 codec is much more recent, very high quality in a very compressed format -- you can get about 10 times as much video on the same card in the camera. But I am pretty sure you will find that VS9 cannot handle it at all. Check the system specs for VS9, but I am pretty sure H.264 is not there. VS10+ (not VS10) is supposed to be able to handle it, as is VS11 -- but there have been complaints from users of both about it.

SUPER is supposed to be able to handle it, but I have never tried so cannot comment on that aspect of your question. I have also never used MJPEG with SUPER -- the few times I have had MJPEG video, I have used VS10 with a MJPEG codec I already had.

Apart from that, though, the times I have used SUPER I have obtained very good quality results in a relatively short time.

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 5:49 am

My preference is the Canon Motion MJPeg codec. Ulead can convert my 640x480@30fps to mpeg2 for dvd without any problems.
Although I bought it for pictures the video isn't that bad.

theobick · Post by **theobick** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 5:37 am

OK I just bought the Canon SD800 IS (MJPEG), shot a few clips and inserted them into a project edited in AVI and another project edited in MPEG. VS9 handled them fine in both projects. The video quality is not too bad and this will allow me to use video that I would otherwise never shoot because the camera is so small it fits in my pocket so I will have it with me more often. And the still shots, the main reason for the camera, are very good.

Thanks for the advice.