Camera Suggestions

[Danny Hays]

I’m not knocking the smoothness of editing HDV, and yes the color corrector does slow down my preview speed with the native 1080 60p. Yes I said 60p!, but only recently have computers been able to smoothly edit HDV and not long before that, Vegas couldn’t give you good preview framerate at best, full with any format. HDV format used to be the beast to edit, remember? I’m used to Vegas and don’t need full framerate preview to edit. It’s all up to your priorities, and video quality is mine. You can build an i7 930 6 gig ram and buy the TM700 for less than the A1 or Z1. I payed about 1700.00 for my A1 and it’s gone up since then too.
I built my i7 for about $1,100. Just letting you know your options.
Danny Hays

[Dave Haynie]

Ditto… I have the HVR-A1. I was pretty happy with it, but also … that wasn’t a cheap model. And every time you use it, there’s wear and tear.

So last year, I bought a Sanyo Xacti FH-1. Sure, kind of a cheap consumer camera. But it did the first decent job I’d seen encoding AVC, and while it had issues, it did 1080/60p… something you didn’t see anywhere short of high-end pro.

I played with it. The main real use was replacing my broken Canon HV10 as a backpacking camera… no OIS, no tape, nothing to break if I drop it, and it was a $300 camera. What surprised me was that it regularly produced better looking video than the HVR-A1. It was no replacement… but better video is better video.

Then there’s the fragility of tape systems. I was shooting a concert last February (Al Steward and Dave Nachmanoff, with my sister Kathy playing piano on “Year of the Cat”)… a cold day, for sure. I got to the venue late, only 1/2 hour to set up. I was getting moisture/reject tape messages from my Sony… condensation? Don’t know. But the usual thing with a Sony doing this… give it a hard wack, and it probably goes away. They have stupidity built-in on the moisture sensor.

Anyway, the Sanyo was the A camera for the first set, just because I couldn’t trust the Sony not to fail.

Shortly after this, I bought an HMC40. It’s not $4000 camera, but compared to the Sony (which I was already happy with), the quality was crazy good. Later, I got the TM700… improved set of guts over the TM300/HMC40, still a family member, thus, less work on color matching. And this is crazy good… no contest compared to the Sony. In the dark, 1080/24p is just going to be better.. for sports, 1080/60p (or 720/60p on the HMC40) is just better.

Panny just dropped the price on both HMC40 and HMC150, too. Very worth consideration. Of course, if you only want to spend $300, the Xacti FH1 is no TM700, but it’s better than it ought to be. It’s hard to believe novices buy “Flip” cameras instead of this, for similar prices.

-Dave

[Mike Hinkel]

I have been at an impasse as far as purchasing a camcorder. I have looked at a lot of them and most I can’t afford. Depending on who you talk to all of them have their pros and cons. The Panasonic HDC-TM700 looks golden for the price, but after reading quite a bit is it as golden editing in Vegas 10 without having to convert the files?

[John Rofrano]

[Mike Hinkel] “The Panasonic HDC-TM700 looks golden for the price, but after reading quite a bit is it as golden editing in Vegas 10 without having to convert the files?”

You bring up a good point should know that Panasonic and Sony haven’t played well together in the past. There have been problems with Vegas not being able to ingest the output from Panasonic cameras. For that price range there are several Sony AVCHD cameras that will be error free in Vegas.

I have a Sony CX12 (which they don’t make any more) and I’m very happy with the output and even mix it with my Sony HVR-A1U output and it holds up very well. Look at the Sony CX series of cameras in that price range before you make a decision to buy.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

Vegas 10 plays fine with modern Panasonic cameras. I think there was a time, when the AVCHD specs were new, that interoperability was a big question. Not so much anymore.

The one problem I’ve seen: Vegas doesn’t detect TM700 1080/24p video as 1080/24p. Now, of course, Vegas wouldn’t need to “detect” anything if Panasonic wasn’t still insisting on encoding 24p as 60i with 3:2 pulldown… that should have ended with tape. And in fact, it did… older Panasonic models, such as my daughter’s SD9, did “native” 24p. So do higher-end Panasonic models, such as my HMC40.

But Panasonic seems to have decided to inflict this problem on consumers. You could make the argument back in the SD days: tape needs a constant frame rate, DVDs want 24p with pulldown anyway. But why re-introduce this bad idea to the consumer line? It is, after all, just a software thing.. they could easily change this to native 24p with a software upgrade.

On the other hand, Vegas ought to detect 24p in a 60i wrapper, or at least let you force the issue. I use Cineform for 24p I shoot on the TM700.. Cineform was a pretty good idea with AVC anyway, until recently (faster PC, better support in Vegas), but not everyone wants another $100 in software just to access a feature that they seemingly already paid for. Ok, there’s probably a freeware solution of some kind…

-Dave