I just want to make sure before I buy a camcorder

DBrooker · Post by **DBrooker** » Fri May 23, 2008 1:36 pm

I ordered VS11.5+ - Before I buy my first camcorder I just want to make sure I have my facts straight as much as possible -

From my research and asking a previous question on this forum I should be able to buy most any type of camcorder and edit the video with VS - Is that correct?

I was also told that the miniDV tape camcorder is still the easiest to download and deal with at this particular time, especially for a newbie - Is that correct?

Thanks for any and all comments - They are appreciated - DB

* I understand that NO software or camcorder is perfect or infallible.

Post by **lancecarr** » Fri May 23, 2008 2:27 pm

As it stands today you are safest with a MiniDV tape cam and you can get some really good deals on the last of the standard def cams at the moment.

Yes, the DV AVI files that you will get from a MiniDV cam are the easiest to deal with and, because they are at the end of their development stage, there are no new surprises in store. They can be edited quite aggressively without problem.

All the other formats are some kind of compressed file based on compression schemes that are very lossy. MPEG2 is now the grandaddy of them yet we still have users on this forum (and other forums as well) who occasionally have trouble editing them. That really is because they were developed for distribution, not editing. This especially tends to happen when full filters are applied or any form of drastic editing.

Some brave souls have lept on to HiDef and there you have the choice of HD MPEG2s which are the easiest to deal with and AVCHD which is still a bit finicky.

My advice is that if you are going for standard def then hands down a miniDV cam is the way to go while you sit back and watch the hiDef scene play out.

okee · Post by **okee** » Fri May 23, 2008 2:38 pm

Hi DB

I've been using Videostudio 11+ for a few months, the 11+ version is supposed to support all the new video formats, i have a MiniDV cam
myself so can't tell you how good it is with AVCHD etc
Although a friend did give me his new panasonic hd camera to edit some
of his videos and after copying the video files and renaming the extension to mpg (he never gave me the software cd for the cam) i was able to work on them no problem in VS

I have a Sony DCR HC 96 MiniDv cam and it works great with Videostudio
allows you to rewind, stop, forward the tape through VS when capturing.
I have it about a year and the reason for going for miniDV was because at the time all reviews were saying that HD was nowhere near the quality of minidv
I prefer miniDv myself because when the tape is finished I just put it away on the shelf and then grab it anytime i want to capture from the tape or edit.
Just so you know A one hour minidv tape captured as a full quality avi file is about 13GB in size, one hour in HD would be larger.
Whichever way you go you'll need a good bit of storage on your PC

okee

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri May 23, 2008 5:08 pm

The most recent article of Videomaker magazine had an article about choosing the right camera:
http://www.videomaker.com/article/13724/

There's a lot of great info on that site, including camera reviews.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Fri May 23, 2008 9:58 pm

I like mini DV so much that when I recently bought a high definition camera, I also bought one which uses the HDV/high def mpeg-2 format, but filmed on a mini DV cassette. One extra thing about this in the world of high def is that you can edit the video, then, in its original though edited form, you can send it back to a cassette in the camera. My camera also came with a HDMI connection, so I can connect the camera direct to my high def TV via HDMI and play back the edited video in high def format. It's brilliant, and saves me having to rush out and spend hundreds of dollars just to buy a Blu-Ray burner and discs... I can wait till the price of those becomes much more reasonable...