Seeking HD camcorder purchase advice...

RudeJelly wrote on 10/26/2009, 2:28 PM

Good people,

I'm getting ready to purchase an HD camcorder and I wanted to check here with you first. I've found a lot of excellent, helpful information here and I remember Eugenia telling someone that "You should have checked here with us before buying an AVCHD camera…', so here I am.

I have a Canon Elura 100 MiniDV camera. I mainly use it for shooting my son's football games for coaches to review game footage and for parents to have DVD's of the games. I also shoot weddings for friends who would like a simple DVD. None of this I do for money – I just enjoy technology. I shoot with a tripod or monopod. Both of my scenarios involve low-light – the football games are at night under stadium lights and most brides want candles and dim lights for their nuptials.

I will likely need to burn regular DVD's for a while (not all of my users have made the switch) with a goal of being able to burn Blu-ray in the future.

I have VMS platinum pro pack v.9b (DVD Architect 4.5d, Sound Forge 9.0d). Capturing, editing and burning are done on an HP Pavilion p6180t (Windows Vista 64bit Home Premium SP1, Core2 Quad Q8400 2.66GHz, 8GB ram, Lightscribe 16X DVD+/-R/RW drive for burning). I intend to claim my "free" upgrade to Windows 7 and install it on this machine.

My budget for now is $600. I'm a fan of Canon products, but I'm open to other suggestions if it will make my life/hobby easier.

I have been looking at the Canon HF200, but was spooked about the whole 30p vs. 60i with no flags thing.

I'd like to be able to follow action and pan without "cheese grater" artifacts and jumpy video. I figure a good camera is the first step. I don't know a lot about the technical details of video, but I am capable of understanding if I'm pointed to a good explanation. And this is why I've come here – because I like the way you tell it like it is.

Sorry for the rambling post and thanks for your help.

RJ

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Comments

Eugenia wrote on 1/13/2010, 11:24 PM

>If you want to put your project on Blu Ray disk - you MUST use AVC or MPEG-2....

Yes, as I said above, Sony AVC crashes on high bitrate HD exports. This is a well known bug.

>Then there is the playback issue of those high bitrate files - VMS chokes on it and uses a TON of CPU

This is where our disagreement lies. It does not choke. It might become slower, but it *doesn't die* during editing. It is only normal for previewing to become slower on higher bitrate videos, because it has to crunch more bits per second.

coasternut67 wrote on 1/14/2010, 4:55 PM

I have NO ISSUE with full screen playback of full HD 1920x1080 @ 24 MBit / sec using Nero 9 file player...in fact it uses less than 50% CPU and does not drop a single frame.

So what does that tell you??? VMS has a bad AVCHD codec in playback AND render.

Rob

Eugenia wrote on 1/15/2010, 12:16 AM

It tells me that you don't understand software architecture.

Video editors will ALWAYS be slower than plain media players because they have a bazillion things going on under the hood that need to keep track of. Never expect the same performance from a media player and a video editor.

david_f_knight wrote on 2/1/2010, 8:39 PM

I don't see such a huge problem as coasternut67 sees. If your goal is to have HD for playback on computers, there are better formats than AVCHD, so the AVCHD encoder in Vegas is irrelevant in this case.

If your goal is AVCHD on DVD, then you have the bitrate limit of DVD media, which is something like 18Mbps or so. So, if you require 24Mbps from some kind of disc, then you must use Blu-ray disks, once again making the AVCHD encoder in Vegas irrelevant in this case.

As I posted in this thread (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=12&MessageID=694144), there's a way to edit your 24Mbps AVCHD source material and produce an AVCHD-compliant DVD. I'm not trying to say there's nothing wrong with Vegas Platinum 9 re: AVCHD, but there is a reasonable way to get excellent AVCHD output from it in cases where it's relevant.

Irbis82 wrote on 2/1/2010, 10:26 PM

New 2010 SONY camcorders have 24Mbit AVCHD mode and nice SONY G optics with EXMOR R CMOS Sensor. Very competitive.
2009 HDR-XR500/520E has very crisp and deep 3D-like picture. New ones shold expand it with 24Mbit.

FKilgore wrote on 2/8/2010, 8:59 AM

A lot of good information here, but what I discovered is that overall film quality of cameras in similar price classes close enough that most cameras will do fine.

However, one overlooked component is sound. I wanted a camera that provided jacks for mics and headphones. The best deal for that I found was the Cannon HF200 which I bought. I also like the SD card as it makes less noise than a hard drive camera and has fewer moving parts.

The video quality for the Canon is wonderful of course.

david_f_knight wrote on 2/9/2010, 4:28 PM

Since there was some mention of waiting for the 2010 models, I just took a quick look at Canon's lineup. It seems to me that there is really only one potential significant improvement of the 2010's over the 2009's: the Vixia HF M300 (list $679.99) and above have a new optical image stabilization called Dynamic SuperRange Optical Image Stabilization with Powered IS. According to the apparently simulated example on Canon's website, it gives handheld results almost as good as using a Merlin Steadicam. But I don't know if it is realistic to expect such improvement in real situations. It will be interesting to see if it really works as good as the demo suggests. If it does, then it is really pretty awesome!

As far as issues previously discussed here, it looks like the 2010 models have the same size and resolution image sensors as comparable 2009 models, so I would expect the same level of low-light performance.