What camera should I buy?

[Onath]

Hey guys,

So we are looking into getting a new camera. Currently we use a camera that has a firewire connection that we connect to the computer and do a direct capture. We use imovie 09 and can watch our footage as it is filming real time.

The cameras I have been looking at are the Canon Hv30 which runs on minidv tapes and has a firewire port. But I feel as though the video and computer world is moving away from mini dv and Firewire.

So the other one I was looking into was the Sony Hdr sr11 it looks like it has quality footage and shoots to a 60gb hardrive.

The difficulty is that both of these cameras are just about equal except for the way in which they record or export data.

Both have a microphone in and headphone jack out
both shoot in Hd and Sd
both are able to have a wide angle lens

Well I'm stuck and not sure which camera to upgrade to. I would love peoples input or suggestions of cameras that you use or like.

Thanks in advance for the help,

 

[mrhogg]

I'd go with the HV30, owing to the quality of the chip in the camera; the visuals are really good.

Also, the video world isn't really moving away from Firewire; video professionals are the main reason people use it at all (especially if you're doing any kind of real-time capture). You could also get the HV30 and an HDMI capture card to capture completely uncompressed video from the camera (compression happens during the save to tape and to Hard Drive).

HDD Cameras are cool for convenience (I just bought a super-cheap Zi6 camera, which is pretty ******), but not as good if you want to do green screening. Saving to the hard drive means more compression, apparently, than saving to tape, and that will negatively effect the quality of the video. It won't make it look bad for normal use, but will make keying the greenscreen tougher, and you'll need to cut out more of the other imagery to get rid of all of the green.

With higher-end HDD cameras it's not an issue, but it is (or it was the last I'd heard) for consumer-level cameras. If you were getting an HVX100, for example, there'd be no issues with greenscreening footage captured to their P2 card.

I think the main question is about Greenscreening; are you going to do it a lot?

 

[Onath]

Greenscreening could be cool. But I don't think it is essential.

So Brian your not worried about Steve Jobs taking away the firewire ports on consumer level laptops as a sign of the death of firewire.

I guess my concern is that I don't want to spend money on a camera and then be teched out of being able to use it.

 

[mrhogg]

It's worrisome, sure, but it's only being removed from the MacBook, not the MacBook Pro, nor the Mac Pro. I think it's one of their lines that's being drawn, that Firewire is a Pro feature, not a consumer feature (since most consumers probably don't really need it, and if you do have a need of it, you're probably not a regular consumer).

I don't think the format's in danger of dying, though.

As far as worrying about being left in the colr, I agree completely, but I've got all my external drives as Firewire, because it's got a faster average speed, which makes it better for capture.

Also, it's pretty handy to plug an external HD into my MacBook Pro's firewire port, then to connect a camera to one of the external drive's firewire ports, and do capture without slowing the computer down. Is nice.

(I don't imagine that's a firewire-only feature, but it's cool)

 

[Onath]

Thanks Brian.

You have definately helped a lot. I wish I could afford the HVX200 that you were talking about.

I think HV30 will probably be the camera I will get then.

If anyone else has input please feel free to contribute.

 

[TheCreatureWork]

I have the 30gb instead of the 60 Sony and find it is crappy in low light situations. The image has a lot of noise (grainy).

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I work with hard drive cameras that use the AVCHD format, and I like them a lot. The AVCHD format is 1920x1080 and the MPEG 2 compression is supposed to be vastly superior to other formats. I love the format because the quality is great and it's really easy to work with; you just plug in the camera in to the computer, dump your footage on to your hard drive and start editing (no need for firewire to transfer footage).

The camera I have used most is a Canon HG10, which is a lower end HD model and unless you're looking for $2000-3000 "prosumer" camera, is a really good choice. The newer (slightly upgraded) models are the HG20/HG21, which are essentially the AVCHD equivalents of the HV30. The only thing I don't like about them is that the audio control is terrible and there is no manual focus ring. If you can use an external mic (which you should anyway) and live without the focus ring it's a solid choice.

I have not done or seen a side-by-side test of the two in terms of picture quality, but I believe they have essentially the same chips, but the HG models shoot at a higher resolution. With an HG model you're shooting square pixel Full HD, which is better than the the anamorphic 1440 x 1080 video you're going to get off the HV30.

I also haven't done a lot of green screen work with AVCHD footage, but I don't see why it would be a problem. While I am not an expert when it comes to video compression, my understanding is that the AVCHD format was developed partially to address the issues with compression you have with other HDD formats.

The downside of AVCHD - and this is really important - is that if you don't have the right software it's a pain to work with because it's still not universally supported. You can edit native AVCHD files (meaning no conversion is necessary) in Premiere CS4, Premiere Elements 7 and most newer versions of Sony Vegas. iMovie `08, Final Cut Pro 6 and Final Cut Express 4 will edit it, but it has to convert it first which takes awhile and the resulting files are much larger than native AVCHD. It's also possible to convert AVCHD to another format for editing in older software, but if you're going to do that I would just shoot in another format.

So, to sum up, imho If you can deal with AVCHD's editing issues I think either the HG20 or HG21 is a better camera than the HV30, but it's really question of preference. Do you want to shoot on tape, or do you want to shoot on a hard drive?

Ultimately, I don't think you can go wrong with either.

 

[Onath]

Thanks Buck,

I think I would prefer to shoot to a HD and dump the stuff to a 1tb external drive.

I will check out the cameras you mentioned thanks.

 

[Toasty]

Thanks Buck,

I think I would prefer to shoot to a HD and dump the stuff to a 1tb external drive.

I will check out the cameras you mentioned thanks.

Onath,

One other thing I'll add to this is that if you are shooting directly to the hard drive, and not also capturing to a built-in camera tape, that you should budget for a very robust backup system for your footage.

Backups of your footage are important ALL the time, of course, but this is especially true when capturing directly to a hard drive while shooting, since you do not have the "automatic" backup of the tape capturing at the same time, which also serves as a way to store your unedited footage for a long time, too.

So, be sure to add a nice RAID or at least a few more external drives to your workflow, so that you can transfer and backup the unedited footage from your working drive soon after you capture it.

 

[Jinx]

If you really want to get deep into this type of discussion check out this forum!

DV info is where to go for video advice. I send them here for puppetry advice!