My dad was a bigtime video buff. Bought a Canon GL-1. I thought he was crazy spending that kind of money on a video camera.
He then passed away and I inherited it (and a pretty good DSLR too).
So I’ve spent quite a bit of time with a kickass camera, want to move to HDTV, but am in no way willing to drop multiple thousands of dollars on an HD equivalent to the GL-1 (With was about $2600 when bought new).
Realizing it’s life is limited, I’m hoping to get some money from the GL-1, I’m just wondering what’s happened to the technology in recent years. I’m hoping against hope that consumer level equipment has improved to the point I won’t miss what made the Canon great (picture and audio quality, instant responce, and picture and audio quality.)
Criteria:
-Most of the results will be post-processed in iMovieHD
-a Large portion of the footage will be in low light - wife’s a Haloween freak and a lot (which the Canon surprisingly didn’t do as well as my Sony SD Mini-DV, which I figure I’ll keep as it does time-lapse)
I have the Canon HV20 and have been very happy with its picture quality; although the optics are inferior to the GL-1 or my old Sony VX2000, (even when it was new, the HV20 could be had for far less than $1000, so it’s decidedly consumer-ish), the 1080p picture and 24p mode more than make up for it. It records in HDV format (compatible with iMovie) on MiniDV tapes.
HV20 has been supplanted by the HV30, which is nearly identical to the HV20, aside from the body color and the addition of a 30p mode. There’s also a new model that uses flash memory instead of tape. I haven’t looked into this one yet, so I’m not sure whether iMovie HD has caught up to the AVCHD format it uses.
I recommend checking out the forums at DVInfo for a wealth of information on this stuff.
Thanks guys, I’m lookin’ into the Canon camera (brand bias? I dunno, Sony’s AVCHD format doesn’t seem to be very well supported) and reviewing HDV ins and outs.
Looking at the prices and closed auctions on Ebay, this seems like it’d be almost a straight across trade. That spooks me a little…and makes me wonder what exactly, I’m giving up. (Prosumer prices look like $3 to $6k…which is stupid for me, I take maybe 3 or 4 hours of video a year)
I can’t help but feel that 15 years from now, my cellphone will take great video footage, stills, and have ample storage onboard to do it.
(The ‘effortless SD editing’ kinda hits home. I’ve spent a LOT of time trying to duplicate effortless HD media playback like I had with my Xbox running XBMP. SD seems to be much more mature.)
The question is, do you want to actually use HD to play it back in HD? Or are you just after increased image quality? Or perhaps you just want a true 16x9 image ratio?
If you have good quality lenses, and a 16x9 CCD (the chip that the image records onto), then your image quality will improve over an older camera on all levels, even when you use it to record in SD. But I’m not sure if HDV cameras allow you to record in SD, whereas I know the HD cameras do.
Plus HDV compresses using the MPEG codec, which uses a method that makes editing to frame accuracy a challenge, and you have to compromise on that when you are making your film. Colour correction is also liable to cause bad artefacting.
However, if frame accurate editing is not that important to you, and if space and RAM available for realtime playback is at a premium, then HDV is probably fine for your purposes.
SD is a perfectly adequate quality level for most consumer purposes. HD is still just a buzzword for anyone outside of professional broadcasting. All you really need is better quality hardware inside the camera.
The one thing you will miss most going from a GL-1 to a lesser camera is the zoom control. Variable speed zoom with a two finger rocker are only available on cameras in the $3000 range. The horrible one-finger, side-to-side zoom controls forced on you by little cameras are downright painful after you’ve shot with a decent zoom.
I’m shooting with a Canon XH-A1 and went that high mostly for the decent zoom.
I’m getting the feeling that the overall tech just isn’t there yet. And by that I mean that the tech is there, it’s just too high up the pro-sumer spectrum for my tastes.
Case in point, the Nikon D1 series cameras were $2000+, 2 megapixel, and took stunning photos. Nothing in the consumer space could touch them…now, there’s a good handful of DSLR’s in the $500-$650 range that are measurable better than the D1 was.
Sony seems to be reviewing well, but in typical Sony fashion, they’re doing things to shoehorn you into their way of thinking…the codec is kinda x.264, but not completely…the camera is GREAT, but not really supported on the Mac…You have to use their software to get to the video…I’m really reluctant to get a ‘superior’ quality product with such arbitrary restrictions.
Long story short, I may wait another year or two before revisiting.
