10 posts tagged “video”

The HV20 arrived at lunch - I'll probaly write a review ina week or so once we have had a bit of time toplay around with it.

At school we are currently getting into video and audio production. Currently we produce about 3 shows fairly regularly for example our current project that we are really into is The Aaron Show. We have produced about four episodes but only released one on the website, however we are currently looking at increasing our production value with some new equipment.

First of all, the camera:

We are currently using a JVC HDD camcorder which is really nice but it does not have a mic input which is a big disadvantage and as it is a hard drive based camera it compresses the video to mpeg 2 so we do not get the highest quality video that you might get with DV tapes - is this correct?

Another problem that we are having is interlacing. When we record the video and edit it there is no sign of any really bad interlacing. We have tried dozens of codec’s in different qualities such as quicktime, mpeg and wmv all of these produce really bad interlacing. So we have more or less narrowed it down to the software that we are currently using Adobe Premiere Elements. As when we watch the footage it is fine before putting it into premiere.

However we think that it might be viable to get a new camera with a mic input and higher quality video and we have narrowed it down to about 3 cameras -

1. Canon HV20 (my preference) It does 1080i and 24p plus it records to DV tapes. I know that Merlin Mann, Leo Laporte and Alex Lindsay like it. The only downside that I know of is that it doesn't have very good low light performance. We would be able to get hold of this for about £680 from amazon.co.uk
2. Sony HDR-HC7 It is over £100 more expensive and it also does 1080i but not in 24p. It also does DV tapes, the main improvement over to HV20 is the low light performance, but I'm not sure if the money is worth the performance.
3. Sanyo Xacti HD2 This is a hard one, it is very cheap from amazon.co.uk at £325 and it does 720p, it has a mic input . The major downside which for most probably isn't, is the fact that it records to SD cards and then obviously through that Mpeg2 which is heavily compressed HD. Also that it takes up a lot of room meaning that with a 4GB card which can be pretty expensive give you about 40minutes of HD video. Another thing for me is something that I can't find anywhere is whether it works with a tripod as due to the design I'm not sure whether is does have one. I'm sure that this camera would be great for "in the field" stuff but most of our work is studio based and if we do go outside we would still definitely need a tripod.

What do you think? - any other suggestions for cameras?

Next is hardware which will affect the software.

Mac or PC? We recently took a trip to a place in Cheltenham about how they produce video they use Final Cut Pro and a host of Macs. But do we really need one and is the Apple software superior over say Adobe’s video suite – but I’ll cover the rest in the software bit.

So lets cover the actual machine itself:

We have a fair budget of about £2300 for the Computer itself.

A big decision is whether we should get a Mac Pro or an iMac. This is hard because we want the computer to be able to everything seamlessly and be able to last a long time (say at least 4 years) This makes us lean towards the Mac Pro as it is very expandable unlike the iMac. There is much more space for hard drives which we would naturally need for video. Plus we could also upgrade the ram easily. But one big downside to the Mac Pro is naturally is the price and would it be overkill to get one especially as we would also have to get a monitor or two. But this is the price that we have come up with:

2.66 GHz

2GB ram (1GB from Crucial)

1x 250 GB HDD

1x 500GB HDD (not from Apple)

ATI Radeon X1900 XT (big question on this in a bit)

Dell 22” monitor

Logitech VX Revolution

This adds up to about £2292

Now here are a couple of questions about the Mac Pro:

1. How long do you expect it to last- as long as we thing it will (4 years +)
2. Do we really need the ATI card or should we stick with the NVIDIA card this is one major thing as we are not sure as to whether it will give us the performance we need in the future if we decided to migrate to even more demanding software.

So next in the iMac. It is far cheaper and seems reasonably powerful but our major problem with it is the expandability. I am aware that they might be updating it on Monday so I shall not go into specs but would a reasonably tricked out one last us a while?

Next is software. We are looking at Final Cut Express which is £200 and comes with some really cool features. Does anyone have any experience with it and are there any issues with it.

Thanks for reading this, there are a lot of questions but it really comes down to whether we should pay extra for a better machine and camera which will last us longer and be more expandable (in the case of the Mac Pro) or is it over kill.

Thanks in advance – remember to check out THE AARON SHOW – episode 2 up next week

Does anyone know of any free video comvertors online, I really need one to get my video podcast up and running- thanks

Vlgmn

OK I've had a few problems with video uploading but I do have one ready (and i think that I've worked out some issues). But for now I'm going to go back to good old text and pictures. Latlry I've been trying to work out in which direction I want to go in with this blog, I mean sure I could go on talking about news that interests me and the odd movie review but really I want to do more - any ideas?

Also I've latley been very excited about something which me and a friend have been working on for quite a while were not sure what it's going to be about but were looking towards a weekly roundtable about the weeks technology stories. It should be good. But yet again I would like to know what would make your dream technology podcast so we can include that to make it the ultimate podcast. But anyway this is still a few months off.

Here is a random list of Podcasts that I listen to (yes there is a ton)

1.This Week in Tech

2. Inside the Net

3. Security Now

4. The Daily Giz Wiz

5. MacBreak

6. Macworld Podcast

7. Mugglecast

8. Pottercast

9. PreviewCast

10. Shurtycast

These are my top ten and I really do recomend them.

What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?

Well I don't subscribe to any as such but when I do walk into the newsagent I normally pick up one of the following:

1. Stuff Magazine - I gadget and technology magazine
2. Doctor Who Magazine - the name really says it.
3. Macworld Magazine - I don't tend to pick it up that much as I can get it on the internet at MacWorld.com
 
So these are the mags that I read   P.S I should have a new video up soon.

Well i think I've done it... (sorry bout the poor sound quality)

It took me over 2 hours but I finnaly worked out the process of getting some video up on to VOX

1. First of all I recorded the video using my webcam

2. Then I save the movie using windows movie maker.

3. I then convert it to mpeg 2 using Blaze media Pro

4.Upload!

Unfortunatly I will only be able to do this for fifteen days because the mpeg convertor is only a trial that I downloaded to get the wretched video working in the first place.