Camcorder fun

posted by Jeff | Saturday, January 28, 2006, 2:11 PM | comments: 0

It's so weird that I have a "day off" when it used to be that every day was a day off. :) Anyway, I started thinking again about HD because I'm really super interested. I still want to make a movie and such.

But now I'm wondering if me buying the HVX-200 is a bad idea. It's a lot of money to spend if I end up not following through on some of the ideas I have for it, and the price doesn't even include P2 cards or an external Firestore hard drive to record on. There's that endless cycle I have about wanting to do something, then feeling bad that I don't do it. :) And now I have some minor concerns about some performance reviews of the camera. Again, they're just minor concerns, as I've seen the video from one of these and it's insane.

I've noticed that Sony's consumer HD camcorder, the HDR-HC1, has been dropping in price like crazy, presumably because Sony is introducing a new, smaller model (that actually loads the tape from the top... gasp!). I'm not a giant fan of the HDV tape format, because it compresses the hell out of HD to fit it down to a 25 mbit stream on standard DV tape. I don't know why exactly that scares me so much, but compared to the DVCPRO HD that the HVX records, on solid state media at that, there's a gigantic difference in quality. I guess not having seen video samples from any HDV camcorder, I wouldn't know.

Then there's just the issue that the HC1 is something I could actually use every day on vacation. Hell, it's smaller than my old DV camera (and the same price mine was in 1999). I'd probably get a lot more use out of it for a fraction of the cost, and it has enough manual control (iris especially) that I could use it for my first "film" if I wanted to.

This subject just continues to tap into that need I have to be using video, both for myself and maybe for a living. I don't know why I continue to deny to myself that it's such a core part of who I am and what I like to do. I saw some video that a friend of mine cut recently just for her own use, and I miss doing stuff like that. I was good at it, much more so than I ever have been writing code. Grrrr.


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