Camcorder Recomendation

[Alex Elkins]

Hi Jack,

Considering the cost, the Panasonic really is a decent camera. I recently did an editing job for a client who was filming their own interviews on this camera and I was worried that there’d be huge issues with picture quality and the import process. Actually it was fine – importing is really straight-forward and a lot quicker than capturing from tape. Of course, the media does take up a lot of space when you capture ProRes, but if you’ve got enough storage then it’s the perfect format for most editing jobs in my view.
Picture quality was better than I expected – you don’t specify what you’d be using this camera for, but you’d get away with low budget music videos, short films, anything for the web etc, especially if you’re able to use a bit of lighting creatively, and it’s ideal for the family videos.
Sound wasn’t great, but you seem to imply you’d be using a mic input anyway, so that’ll help a lot. I couldn’t tell you anything about the surround sound capabilities of the camera – I wasn’t even aware that you could record surround sound in the first place, I’ve just assumed that any surround mixing was applied in post.

Couldn’t tell you anything about the Sony, but personally I’d choose a Panasonic over a Sony camera as a rule. I find that Panasonics (and Canons) have a much softer feel, which is ideal for films and music videos. Sonys tend to be favoured for more corporate work, with their really crisp colours and sharp focus. It’s not something I’m keen on though.

[Carlo Zoratti]

Hi guys,
i just bought an HDC-HS100
it’s a great camera, but it has some lacks:
– battery power lasts for no more then 2h 30min with the vbg260 (which is still really expensive 170 euro from panasonic in italy)
– it doesn’t have fire wire connection – so you can’t get streaming video straight into computer
– it seems there is no way to connect it to macintosh computers to grab the footage (you can with still images but not with video since the software panasonic provides doesn’t work on mac) – i’m right Alex? how did you connect it?
Aside what i mention above i completely agree with alex and i can tell you the manual ring works great, smooth and solid so you have a proper control of whatever you are controling (’cause i can controll ether focus / zoom / shutter speed/ Iris)

So i’m happy with it. Maybe just too new!

carlo

PS: alex if you know how to get mac connection, please some help is needed here 😀

[Alex Elkins]

[Carlo Zoratti] “if you know how to get mac connection, please some help is needed here”

Hi Carlo – I just used a card reader that my boss bought from eBay. It worked fine. Doesn’t the camera have a USB connection? Try plugging that in, then in Final Cut go to File> Log and Transfer… that should then open a window where you can see all your clips (you may need to point Final Cut to the folder where the clips are). Once you’ve done that you can transfer them all into Final Cut ready for any editing, colour correction, re-encoding for web viewing etc. It sounds like you can’t just ‘grab’ the clips straight off the card, but AVC-HD isn’t a particularly effective format to be viewing the clips in anyway. FCP converts them to ProRes, much better for editing.
The camera also has an HDMI connection, so you can capture the video through that as well if you’ve got the relevant i/o card in your computer – Blackmagic do a couple that have HDMI.

[Carlo Zoratti]

Hei Alex! Thank you very much for your answer. I’m actually using HDD recording so i need to grab from the camera. So i started grabbing the footage trough iMovie 8 which allows to Import it. But is just taking an insane amount of time. It takes almost 3 times the length of the file so to grab 1 hour footage i need 3 hours. Is it the same with final cut? I haven’t tried yet since i don’t have FC 6.
May it be that the conversion from AVCHD to apple intermediate codec produces grainy images????

Thank you

carlo

[Alex Elkins]

When I did it through FCP it took about a third of the time – much faster than realtime, and it converted it to ProRes, although I believe you can also convert to Apple Intermediate Codec. It probably also depends on your processor speed I suspect. You can’t do this with FCP5 though – I think there are various long-winded workarounds, but I’ve thankfully not had to try any.