My next camcorder ....

S

sdd

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Most threads regarding camcorders tend to end up discussing complicated aspects of digital recording that I do not understand - like this one: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=89934&highlight=camcorder

I am in the market for a new camcorder with a budget of no more than R4000.
Will use the camcorder to film my kiddies birthdays, family outings, and family orientated stuff.

Don't foresee doing editing, but would like to easily cut parts out (the boo-boos). Having owned a Mini-DV model, I found the process to be quite tedious and resource intensive.

Never used a HDD camcorder and I like the feature of not have to wait real time to download footage onto PC.

Is the HDD camcorder the way to go? Can you easily cut out parts of the footage?

http://www.makro.co.za/ProductDetail.aspx?cat=6310&prod=34952&SKU=000000000000114159|EA Panasonic
http://www.makro.co.za/ProductDetail.aspx?cat=6310&prod=34561&SKU=000000000000111745|EA Sony

Please help me out here. I want to get a new camera before my son's birthday at the end of March.
 
Last edited:
It is certainly the simplest. You plug in/dock the camera like a external hard-drive and just copies the movies off the disk. I usually don't even bother and edit/cut from the camera to a local file.

I have a 60GB Sony HDD cam (also bought from Makro) and to be honest, about 40GB of it is a waste. Looking back I would've rather gone for a smaller model and bought more batteries (good investment) and maybe an external mic.
 
I was thinking the same thing about the HDD capacity ... do I really need 40gigs or 60gigs. I mean, even if we go on holiday (3 weeks) the most we shot was about 2 mini-dv's worth anyway.

With my old camcorder the biggest pain was the short battery life ... so getting a spare battery is a must.

@fudzy: is it possible to do crude editing on teh footage? Does the supplied software allow for this?
 
To be honest, I never even installed the software I got with it. I imagine it would, I wanted something a bit more so I went out and bought Sony Vegas :)
 
i also hav a sony camera but with the mini-DV's. very good camera, 4 megapixel still pictures, 3 or 3.5 inch widescreen touchscreen, will cost you about 5grand. i saw one in makro. i bought this one in USA
 
I use Premire Pro 2 with a DV camcorder and it's great. But I do more advanced stuff than I'm sure you want to do, which makes most of the features in PPro unnecessary. If you want a decent editing package, get Premiere Elements.
 
Don't ever use the software that you get with the camcorder. I have a 40gb model which does the job just fine. Use a professional package. I use Pinnacle and you won't believe the difference in quality when transferring the media from camcorder to pc. I also have Sony Vegas which is really good.
 
Leftfoot said:
Being in the video production industry, I always go for MiniDV format over a hard drive based camera. DVD format cameras are really bad, avoid them at all costs.
Click to expand...

Mini-dv will always produce the best quality because the video is uncompressed. Could you share with us exactly what type of work you do?
 
I use VideoReDo (http://www.videoredo.com) for cutting and trimming of MPEG video files, which is basically all you need when editing home video footage. It is a great, simple, no fuss, reasonably priced application. The most important features for me are:

- Frame level editing, with thumbnail strip for easy frame selection. The thumbnail strip is configurable - I normally use it in single frame mode.
- Smart rendering, so it does NOT recode when saving. This preserves the quality and makes saving very fast. Recoding is only done for small sections around where the footage has been edited.
- Nice thumbing control to easily navigate forwards and backwards in the MPEG file.
 
Hi

I can get this camera for R3000. Is it a good camera? Is price ok - or should I offer lower? Camera is about 18 months old.

Sony DCR-SR60E 30GB HDD with cables, charger, battery, docking station.
 
Leftfoot said:
Being in the video production industry, I always go for MiniDV format over a hard drive based camera. DVD format cameras are really bad, avoid them at all costs.
Click to expand...

This generally only applies if you plan on editing. Because when you finish editing footage from a MiniDV, you'll compress it. With the HDD, it's already compressed into MPEG, so any editing more than a bit of trimming won't turn out great.
 
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