CAMERA DILEMMA

[igotthat]

Hi, having a very hard time with camera choices. I film car related events and put out dvds that are roughly 90min long. I have now a canon xl2 but am wanting to upgrade to HD and hopefully a camera thats not a sbig and bulky. This camera is considered “professional” grade however iv been told i can get better quality switching to say a canon hv30/40 even though its considered a “prosumer” and is not 3ccd. can anyone give me any input, Thanks

[Grinner Hester]

I shoot car events with an old FX1 and it works more than fine for the need. I am going to upgrade to a 5D soon but most motorsports stuff I’ll still use the FX1… till I kill it, anyway.

[igotthat]

see i thought about going dslr but people ahve told me ill have trouble compressing that much footage from a dslr to a 90min dvd and keeping any good quality. iv been told it has to be minidv and that will be best quality. i dont have any other cameras to test with and thats what making it hard.

[igotthat]

btw who did your website?

[composite1]

“people ahve told me ill have trouble compressing that much footage from a dslr to a 90min dvd and keeping any good quality.”

Not true.

First off, you’ll do your edit in HD then hopefully do an uncompressed digital master of the final product. Then you’ll export a copy from the master into SD (also uncompressed) for an SD Master.

The tricky part will be tweaking your settings when you turn the uncompressed SD Master into an MPEG2 file. Many editors recommend a bit-rate setting for DVD at 8-9 Mb/s. You’ll be cutting it close using your NLE software to get the vid and any menus to fit within the 4.7GB space on a DVD.

There are ‘Cleaner’ software which will help much more professional looking compression like Sorenson Squeeze just to name one. Sans, running out and buying new software see how well you can budget your digital space and still get a good looking MPEG2 video file.

If you lit and shot your footage well, then did good color correction/finishing in post, you should still have a very nice looking vid and DVD at the end of the day.

[igotthat]

thanks for the info, knowing that my decision is even harder now lol. dslr could also be a route to go now and keep me from having to have 2 cameras as well.

[igotthat]

i guess at the end of the day im just wondering if say a hv30/40/dslr or something would be as good or better quality than the xl2 i have now.

[EarlC]

I posted some info on the thread, “Intro and Learning/Gear Questions” just a bit ago that might be of interest to you. The biggest difference in most DSLR units and the camcorders you’ve mentioned (aside from the HV30/40 being discontinued MiniDV tape recording models) and the replacement HF S21 having a fairly small single sensor but still getting serious nods by users in the business, is sensor size, and of course, in many cases, interchangeable lenses.

Check out the comments on the other thread if you’re curious.

[Woody]

Well, you’re final product is SD DVD, thats the goal. Sometimes you can down size HD and have “Better” looking footage but thats not always the case. I have and use a HV 40 as a back up camera. It has a lot of limitations and I’ve shot better footage for DVD with my back up GL2, which is less camera than you have.

The HV40 has some pretty bad issues with “Skew” and”Wobble” during vibration and panning. I tried running it in my boat and the footage was useless.I use it formore of an interview type cam or a un-manedsecond angle cam. It also has a very narrow field of view, most of the small pro-sumer model. Between what you have and a camera like the HV40, I would not drop the 3CCD for filming any type of action for DVD.

In the prosumer level I do have a VG10 I like a lot, its very stable. Sony is about to come out with the VG20, having more options than the10 and additional manual control. Itskind of like a GL2 on steroids with interchangable lenses.

[igotthat]

Thanks alot for the info guys, im going to do a little more research now.

[Author]

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