Considering Panasonic D300 DVD cam

[Anonymous]

I am thinking about buying a DVD cam and the just released Panasonic D300 seems good on specs. However friends had said that editing footage shot to DVD can be very difficult.

What I would like to know is:

1) If I was to use DVD-RAM in camera, then load the disc into the PC which has a DVD-RAM compatible drive, what s/w will be able to read and edit the images I shoot.

2) Is the format on DVD-RAM playable on a domestic YAMAHA DVD player?

3) What is a cost effective s/w for creating final DVD for distribution to family and friends.

Would the Ulead s/w packages be a good starting point?

Cheers,

[alohrey]

DVD camcorders are not the right choice for an editing format. You should look into a mini dv camera if you want to edit. DVD cameras are great for people shooting their family christmas or vacation (you can pop it in to any stand alone player and watch right away) but not a good choice for the editing enthusiest. I say this mainly because video encoded to a dvd is in an mpeg compressed format, much lower quality than DV footage found even on cheaper mini dv cams. Keep looking, and let us know what you end up going with.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

pszilard Wrote:

However friends had said that editing footage shot to DVD can be very difficult.

Your friends are correct. Like my man "alohrey" has already mentioned, the video you shoot on a DVD camera is compressed to a MPEG style format. NLE’s don’t really do a good job with MPEG files and some can’t even touch them. DVD cameras are really the last type of camera you would want to use for compiling video and editing. These cameras however do have their place for people that just want to shoot little Johnny and then throw the disk into a DVD player and see instant results. At first these cameras were thought by some to be the latest and greatest but as time went on I think the manufacturers realized the limitations they had and now you don’t see to many of them any more.

I tried editing video that a friend had from his disk camera. I struggled and struggled with that DVD disk so finally what I did was I recorded from his camera directly to a VHS deck and then captured that VHS tape to my PC via my MiniDV camera (via AV pass through) which worked but when I was done it looked like crap.

If you are planning on editing video then I would strongly recommend tape cameras as well.

RAM

[Author]

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