daydok

i'm looking at buying a new video cam, and i am leaning towards a flash-based one such as the sony hdr-cx7. i heard the canon HF10 is a winner as well.

i like the portability and the 'no moving parts' argument for it, as opposed to a hard-drive based camcorder.
i hear the battery lasts longer, too (true?)

questions for anybody out there who has experience with this:

1. which one did you choose (why?)
2. is importing captured video to your pc as simple as popping the sd card to a reader on your mac/pc?
3. any challenges with avchd conversions (also, what editing software do you use)?
4. i read that an 8GB sd card can hold up to about 1:20 worth of HD footage. is that about right, or is that an exaggeration from your experience?

thanks for any input.

nicke60gre

After my research for a friend's buy, I ended up suggesting him the Panasonic HDC HS 9 which he finally bought and he is more than happy with this unique machine.

It's a 3CCD cam
It's true full HD 1920 x 1080 (HDMI/AV/USB interfaces)
It uses up to 16GB (nowadays avail) SD memory cards.
It has Optical image stabilator (lens built-in - no software or something)
High quality LEICA lens
High speed burst mode (24 still images/sec @ 2.1mb res)
0.6 sec start-up time, with 3sec. pre-rec option
"live" operating advice function ...and many more unique/intelligent features.

but the most important feature: It also has a 60GB HDD built-in, you can use for extra long (+2 hours) of full HD shootings.

Advice: Buy a bigger than stock spare battery (I always carry a second battery and a car charger)

daydok

update: well, i bought one, and uploaded a 14second hd sample.
sorry it's not a cinematic shot; just took a video as soon as i got it.

would be interested to get your opinion if an hd clip is significantly better from say, a regular video from youtube.
directly on a plasma screen it's brilliant, but on the web i'm not so sure i can tell if it's that much better.

thanks

techspecs: this 14 second 1080i clip was converted from avchd to mpeg2, then uploaded to a site that takes hd videos.
(14sec mpg2 = 16MB total)

Rudy

Is there supposed to be sound?

daydok

er, should be...but i see what you mean. not sure what happened; i do have sound on the raw clip.
what's the verdict, rudy? hd capture posted on the web worth the price?

Rudy

It seems like there is a burst of sound at the very beginning but after that, complete silence.

The quality seems good but I can't say if it's "worth the price" because I don't have any more information about price and/or alternatives...

bruce_miranda

I bought the HDC-SD5 last year and its flash based. Various reasons why I didn't mind only flash at the time instead of the Sony Hybrids with the HDD. Firstly because a DVD can hold only about 8GB of data so using 8GB memory cards made sense. It takes long enough to get 8GB across on to a computer/disc so I knew I'd never have the time or patience to do 40-100GB! Also because the 16gb cards were just out the 8gb cards were cheap as chips so now I carry about 10 of them in the bag and its still smaller than most camcorders. I didn't want to buy something big and not use the features of its size.

AVCHD is a royal pain to edit on the computer and that finally made me buy a new laptop too. Ok so my previous one was 5 years old but I never felt it was not up to the job until I started doing some work on AVCHD files.

HughH

I got the sound...very clear and nice Where's the looove!

The video was also VERY clear, better than what you usually see on YTube. Only marred by mosquito noise on some of the light areas.

I was impressed by your movie making technique...keep it up!

Rudy

I'm hearing the sound on the new (second) clip you posted but the first one is still silent...

Looks cool -- did you actually drive completely over the camera while is was running?

daydok

glad you guys liked it. yeah rudy, drove over it! thanks again for the feedback