Buying a camcorder for use with PC

Any Blitz users here into camcorders? I have a £500 budget but I am not sure what sort of camera I should get. I`m quite interested in the hard disk ones but how good are these?

I need to connect to my PC and edit footage. Can this still be done with none hard drive cameras?

What are the pros and cons?

Any advice or recommendations would be most welcome,

Jason.

try and get one that can record progressive; interlace looks terrible when you try to edit on a computer.

we have a JVC GRFX17 and TeVion DVD Maker, this enables us to connect the camcorder to my pc and capture footage with ease. the GRFX17 is not a top of the range camcorder but for its price its value for money with some great editing features builtin.

with TeVion DVD Maker you need a 2.2ghz cpu and windows 2k or windows xp to capture footage from the camcorder.

for both GRFX17 and TeVion DVD Maker its way under your £500 budget with plenty left the GRFX17 also comes with optional LCD screen for a little extra.

kev

If I was going to get a new camcorder (since the lens packed up on my Samsung one) I'd get one of the Sony DCR camcorders. Aside from recording to HD they have a nice powerful optical zoom.

The Samsung one I had was OK - mini DV format, recordable onto PC via firewire, and the camcorder was controllable via PC. Downside was that if you had an hour of video, it took an hour to get it onto PC. It also liked to munch on miniDV tapes every now and again.

Don't buy the ones that record straight to DVD - they're complete crap.

I have a stone old Sony DCR-TRV 33E, but it's still doing its job very well. I can control it from my PC (stop, rewind, forward, play, etc...), and transfer movies via Firewire to my PC. It has also 16:9 WideScreen mode, which I started to use only now. The optical Zoom is also very nice, haven't needed a better Zoom yet. Picture quality is also very good. One thing I also like is the nightvision mode, you can make movies when it's totally pitch black dark, as the camera sends an infrared signal and records the reflections, the result is a black/greenish-gray movie which looks totally cool :)

I think there are better camares out by now, but I would take the Sony DCR-TRV 33E as comparison model when buying a new one, it should do everything what the Sony does plus tons more and with better quality.

Anything using the newer Sony-developed CCD sensors should be up to performing the tasks you'd want.

The feature sets of £300-£500 camcorders vary only slightly. Most offer at least USB connectivity and generally Firewire as well (which you should use instead of USB where possible). Image quality comes down to the sensors and optics and are really the two main considerations when buying any image capturing equipment ;)

Yeah, the quality of movies when transferring via USB is plain horrible. The camera must stream the movie in real time, and that's why only Firewire is an viable option.

Do most Sony models have firewire as looking at some stats on their site most only list USB 2.0 Actually this only seems to be on the hard drive models. Do they not need firewire?

Here are they available jjacks on the one I`m interested in,

# Audio Out
# S-Video Out
# USB
# Video Out
# Lens / Zoom:

Is one of these another name for firewire?


Jason.

My guess is that on hard drive models, you can directly copy the movie file from the Camcorders's harddrive to your harddrive via USB, then no realtime streaming is needed and you get even better quality than with Firewire.

And in this case USB is good enough to transfer the file, as it's probably also packed on the Camcorders harddrive. With MiniDV Camcorders the movie needs to be transferred unpacked in realtime, and that's why Firewire is needed.

I use a JVC GZ-MG21E camcorder that has a 20gig hard drive... it gives ya about 4.5 hours in high res mode, 9 hours in standard & 25 hours in economy lo-res mode.

It splits whatever you film into 5 minute long files & it connects to the PC with a USB lead... the files can be simply dragged & dropped from the camera to your HD.

It also takes an SD card that you can record video directly to as well, but I just use the SD card for storing still images on personally, cos it's quicker than connecting the camera to the PC when I take pics for textures.

The only downer I've found with it so far is the resolution of the still images... 640 x 480... the video it records hi-res mode, is outstanding!... the normal res is about on par with Hi-8 & the lo-res is about the same as VHS.

It comes packaged with Cyberlink Power Director & Power Producer... all ya have to do is drop the files into the time-line & then edit em how ya like. Then you have options to make either a web streaming movie, high quality DVD, MP4, AVI... etc etc

Thanks for clearing that up, I expected that was the case.

Jason.

This statement doesn't make sense, since USB2.0 is faster than firewire.

Yah, that's what I thought, but wasn't sure enough to post. :)

Well, USB2 has a maximum speed of 480Mbps, Firewire is up to 400Mbps.

BUT...

With USB2, 480Mbps is shared across all USB devices. Firewire is 400Mbps per device, so unless you have two or three devices all transferring masses of data at once, USB2 is faster.

Ah. You got to admit that 'firewire' sounds faster than USB2, though. :D

P.S. You no IRC anymore, Gfk?

Nah, too many kiddies. Can't be bothered with it.

k. Although, you-know-who isn't on THE chan anymore, so things have settled down a bit. :)

It makes sense, because my Camcorder has only USB 1.0 which is way slower than Firewire.

USB2 may well be quoted faster than Firewire, but USB2 is not so good at sustained transfers of large-volume data such as video. Firewire is, to all intents and purposes, designed purely with the thought of transferring big chunks of data as fast as possible and with as little CPU overhead as possible.

Firewire is a peer-to-peer protocol, with devices communicating directly with each other, rather than through a central hub. USB devices have all their data transfers controlled by the hub, with handshaking/checksumming per packet. Firewire just shoves a big bunch of data down the wire (slightly more technical, but the comparison holds).

Nobody has yet seen a 480Mbs capable USB2 controller. Firewire works at 400Mbps, with some devices supporting 800Mbps. 1600 and 3200Mbps are in the works.

http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/usb20vsfirewire/

The real question: Will it blend?
http://www.willitblend.com/videos.aspx?type=unsafe&video=vidcam

The original 1394A FireWire is... But there's also 1394B (or FireWire 800) which runs at 800 mbps and is almost twice as fast as USB2.

One final question, as I want to edit my movies after shooting them are there any disadvantages between the different formats, mini dv, dvd and harddisk?

I`ll probably go for the hard disk one but I want to make sure before I spend my money. I`ve heard that dvd ones can be a problem when it comes to editing, is there any truth in that?

Jason.

Not sure about editing, but the overall quality of the DVD ones rules them out immediately, for me. If you happen to get a bad DVD disc, and you're recording something of relative importance, you could end up missing the lot.

I've had mini DV in the past, and I've nothing against the format, but my Samsung camcorder died way before its time. The advantage of having a hard drive one is that you don't have to buy tapes - good quality miniDV tapes can be more than £10 each, and as I said above, transfering the video from camera to PC is painfully slow.

Another downside to miniDV tapes is that they only last for around 45 minutes on standard play, or 90 minutes on long play, so don't convince yourself to buy one good tape and think that'll be enough - it won't.

The DVD ones are probably the most tricky ones to edit, since they are intended for direct replay on a TV.
You'd have to rip them first, and edit the resulting file.

Harddrive-based players aren't bad, except that the drives are a lot more expensive than MiniDV tapes (which hold about 60GB, IIRC) plus they don't tend to be easy to swap out, so you're a lot more limited in how much you can record.

Overall, I'd put DVD dead last, HD 2nd, and MiniDV first if I'd had to buy another video camera at this point. (I have one of the early MiniDV models myself)

Harddrive Camcorders are the best at this moment. Best movie quality, and that's all what counts. And you don't need multiple harddrive devices, as you can always transfer the stuff to your PC, and start from scratch. Of course 2-3 are nice to have, if you are recording movies in the woods for 3 weeks without your main PC.

You'd also need about 20 batteries.

I've got a Canon MV890 and it's great. Holds a mini DV tape, records in true wide screen (no cropping or stretching). I get the 1 hour tapes (not long play) that cost about £3 a pop. Image quality is great blah blah blah...

Now I'm sure if you want to do anything serious this will be a heap of crap, however, for most people I'm sure it's more than adequate.

On top of that it comes bundled with pinnacle software.

You plug it into the computer via firewire and it transfers from tape to hard disk in real time so an hour tape takes an hour to transfer, which is a bit annoying, but hey... it's very cheap.

It's not High Def, but it is DVD res... So to be honest, it's pretty good.

The battery lasts for 2-3 hours, you can get additional ones too, and they're tiny, frankly I'm stunned they last as long as they do!

http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/pl/8-567864/Camcorders/Canon-MV890-Compare-Prices

Personally I like removable media, the hard disk recording cameras (although I've had no experience of them, don't own one etc etc) from what the Gadget show say aren't quite as good as they should be yet, and they still opt for tape based cameras. The upside of the hard disk ones is the transfer rate of the files is fantastic.

Dunno... I did a proper wedding video for somebody with my Samsung cam a couple of years ago, and that cam was the cheapest of the cheap at the time.

The results were great. Most of the quality when you're doing anything 'serious' is down to the way its shot, and the way its edited. My camera was mounted on a tripod so no dodgy camera shake manifested itself. All the panning and zooming was carefully done and nice and smooth, and the full edit took me two days.

This does remind me of another problem I had, though. On the day, I used three tapes on long play - the quality was still good enough as it was only destined for VHS anyway. But, a big problem I encountered was that I had to remove the tripod mount from the camera - it was impossible to open the tape compartment with it on. Minor detail, but it was very inconvenient for what I was doing. It turned what should be a ten second job into a couple of minutes.

Yeah you have to do that with my cam too, the tape goes in the bottom so if you've got it on a tripod you need to take it off it first.

Oh, something else you've got with my canon thing is external mic input, which is really handy if you don't want to get the noise of the tape running over the whole recording, ok, it's only a very slight noise, but it's there.

This one gets my vote

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000N1Y1OW/kelkoocpc-electronics-photo-camcorders-21/ref=nosim

....mmm tempting.

Not bad. 10x optical zoom is slightly off-putting, though. Digital zoom is useless so that doesn't even begin to make up for it.

Yes 10x zoom is a little disappointing, shame as many of sony's camcorders have 25-even 40 times.

[Edit] I see they do a 2x teleconverter which would get it up to 20x, costs £55

Heh, firewire has a higher average throughput than USB2. Note that the real throughput is not the same as theoretical. FW is in alot of cases still faster than USB2 but it depends on the implementation :)

My camera is much faster on FW than USB2.