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Best Camera for Blog - HD or standard?

K

kpritcha13

macrumors member
Original poster
May 6, 2007
33
0
Hi guys! I'm hoping you can help me out here. Right now I am helping my professor produce some video blogs and we are using the built in iSight camera on his iMac. They are about 15 minutes long each. We now want to upgrade to an actual camcorder. The thing with his blogs is they are time sensitive and I try to get them posted with in 3 hours of filming as they have to do with current events.

Does HD film take longer to import and export out of Final Cut Express?
Right now it takes about 15 minutes to import and 15-20 to export.

What camcorder would you recommend? We have about $700 to spend.

Here are the computers we use to edit:
MBP 2.2 Intel Core 2 Duo
4gb Ram
120gb hd

iMac 24"
2.4 Intel Core Duo
2gb Ram
320gb hd

Anything else we need to edit HD film?

oh and if you feel like checking out the blogs - www.plaidavenger.com
 
For $700 you would most likely be looking at an HDV camera and those can be really render intensive. If speed is an issue, I would probably stick with SD. With that said, for that much money you can pick up an HV20 which is a great camera for the price.

P-Worm
 
how intensive?

P-Worm said:
For $700 you would most likely be looking at an HDV camera and those can be really render intensive. If speed is an issue, I would probably stick with SD. With that said, for that much money you can pick up an HV20 which is a great camera for the price.

P-Worm
Click to expand...

How long is render intensive? I mean rendering again probably takes me 15 mins for a 15 min file. How long does it take for HD?
 
SD on a MBP is about real time to 2x the length of the footage.

HDV on a MBP is about 4.5-6.5x the length of the footage.

these are for compression to MPEG-2 & audio file (dolby or aiff)

I would suggest you capture in SD if you are time sensitive.

If not, then capture in HDV, edit natively in HDV, and let compressor take care of the rest.

Just make sure to raise your laptop a bit off the table, leave the left side edge of the MBP hanging off your desk about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way and have a fan blowing at it while it is crunching. After a few hours, our MBPs would become grills hot enough to cook on.

If 3 hours is all you have, then capture the footage, capture to hard drive,

edit, encode to H.264 and upload to servers.

HV20 should be available for a nice price these days. Bear in mind many HDV cameras will record in DV mode as well. SO GO WITH STANDARD DEF.

I don't work with them so I can't tell you about workflow, but perhaps the record to HD camcorders might be helpful for you (built in Firestore). Don't know about compatibility though.

Best of luck!
 
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