[DM-MUG] Digital Video Camera Recommendations

[Darcy Baston]

I use a Formac StudioTVR device to capture video from whatever NTSC 
footage I'm working with. It has RCA, S-video and coaxial inputs. I did 
my wedding video with it, and iMovie of course. Worked great.

During parts of the wedding,  like during the first dance, I cut in 
scans of photos from the photographer (using an HP scanner with my 
wife's PC since it couldn't get it to work on the iBook G4), did some 
effects, and laid the original song over all that so that there weren't 
any audible interruptions. The iLife integration of iTunes playlists 
into iMovie worked perfect for that. I also keyed the imposition of 
stills to match different verse/chorus changes in the music.

There was a scene where my mother did a little dance about a second 
long. I made multiple clips of that move, going back and forth in 
direction, and played some country riff from Garageband over it. 
Hillarious!

The 45 mins +- of footage I first captured in DV format was about 13 
gigabytes of data. Once I shrunk the movie down proportionately from 
720 pixels wide to 512, and compressed it with MP4 with Quicktime Pro, 
it was a nice 450 megabytes which was easily distributed to family on a 
CD.

The video cam used was an old panasonic from the early 90s. It used 8mm 
tapes. I don't know much about DV cams, but I'm sure Sony or Canon are 
good choices. Just remember that when a Sony DV cam says it has "ilink" 
technology, that means firewire compatibility. Or so I think!

It took me 3 days to edit the wedding video, about 6 hours of work per 
day. iMovie gets very slow and saves like a turtle when you've got 
around 50 clips in the timeline. You can walk away and make coffee at 
times. I thought my iBook G4 933Mhz was pretty speedy until that 
context! Audio editing is a little wonky when you get into manual 
volume fades in the timeline. Sometimes you're left with 1/100s blip of 
sound even when the sound is muted for that whole clip. I sometimes had 
to export a clip, mute it in QT pro, and reimport it into iMovie. Audio 
extraction is not flawless in iMovie. You can often yank the audio out, 
delete it, and the clip will still do a quick click/blip sound at the 
beginning and/or end of the remaining video clip.

Hope this helps.

warm wishes,
Darcy

On 4-Oct-04, at 9:52 AM, Jon Engelhardt wrote:

> Good Morning,
>
> After attending a DMMUG meeting this summer on how to utilize iMovie I 
> think I'm ready to purchase a new digital video cam.  I have miles and 
> miles of analog tape of our kids growing up (they are gone now so I 
> can afford a better camera) but now I'm ready to start weaving digital 
> stills and movies with music together of our activities and get 
> together's and then place them on DVD's.  We just returned from a 
> wonderful vacation in CO and I have some great still's but I do wish I 
> would have had a video cam.  Jon Thompson sent me some great ideas 
> when I questioned him but now I'd like to hear of your ideas and 
> experiences.  I am mostly retired so I have time to produce cinematic 
> epics, especially now that winter approaches.
>
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I'd like to stay under 
> $1,000.00 if possible.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jon Engelhardt
> Adel, IA
>
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