Yes, I have finally given in and gone HD. Sort of. I purchased a Canon HV30, and so far I love it. It is tiny, the pictures on the web don’t give you a frame of reference so it’s difficult to tell. Even with it’s small size I find it’s pretty stable. I went out with the family this past weekend to the 2008 Batsto Country Living Fair and was completely hand held. I shot in HDV, then forced it to output as SD video into Vegas 6. I have captured the HDV to test chromakey and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the key.
One issue I had was that it captured fine, but I could only see the video on the camcorder, not on the preview screen within Vegas. the audio played fine on the timeline but the video jumped from frame to frame. I need to delve more into intermediate codecs, and upgrade to Vegas 8 which has some features built in. Back to the Fair video. As I said, I captured as SD, downconverting in the camera. I edited a four minute piece, with dissolves and a few text graphics. Nothing fancy, I wanted to get it up on my other blog.
Now if you’ve been here before you know my preferences for export for upload to Youtube. I use the same parameters for Revver.com. A full screen WMV 9 file at 640×480. This time I went 720×480 and kept the widescreen. I wasn’t really happy with the WMV output, and its even worse when converted to flash on Revver. I’m going to embed both the flash and Quicktime versions here and you can see the differences, if there are any. I need to do some more experimenting with the import and export settings, possibly add some RAM to the PC and upgrade to Vegas 8. You think you’re going to get away cheap, but it never seems to work out that way. LOL. Anyway here are the videos.
flash
4 responses so far ↓
1 Angela Grant // Oct 23, 2008 at 10:39 am
We’re going to try out the Canon HG20 for a new kit that reporters and photographers can check out.
2 admin // Oct 23, 2008 at 6:18 pm
That looks nice a nice set up. I’m still kind of old school, started out with 3/4″ tape, and like tape that I can then put up on the shelf for backup instead of planting a hard drive farm.
an update, I did a teswith Vegas 8.0 and the PC handled the HDV fine, and rendering those clips out to wmv looked fabulous. Now to see if I can replace the downconverted SD clips with their HDV originals and re-render.
3 Tapeless video kit for less than ,000 | News Videographer // Oct 30, 2008 at 7:43 am
[...] you know what? It’s not that bad. TV guy Bill Mecca just bought a Canon HV30 and he seems pretty happy with it. I purchased a Canon HV30, and so far I love it. It is tiny, the pictures on the web don’t give [...]
4 John Cunningham // Aug 15, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Just picked up an HV20 for $250 on CL per Bill’s recommendation. He has been very helpful researching and passing along info.
Thanks again Big Bill
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