New JVC Everios

[berkleeboy210]

Hey,

I noticed the new line of Everios that were released look pretty good. In Particular I was looking at the GZ-MG255 they now include a docking station that has a firewire output. - does this make them imovie compatible right out of the box now?

that was my main holding switch on buying one of these because of the slow usb transfer speeds and quality.

thanks in advance.

 

[Gymnut]

I do not own one of these so I cannot speak firsthand but from what I understand is despite the docking station, these hard drive based camcorders record movie data in MPEG-2 format so they would be incompatible with iMovie. Granted you could convert the camcorders files using software such as MPEG Streamclip www.squared5.com, to a Quicktime format albeit you'll likely lose a little video quality in the process. The benefits of a hard drive based camcorder would of course be the simple fact that you would be able to store several hours worth of footage at its highest quality setting without having to worry about paying for recording media. Personally I would steer clear of DVD and hard drive based camcorders, but that's just me.

 

[hvfsl]

There currently aren't any good Hard Disk or DVD based camcorders out there. What I mean by that is that they get beaten in price and video quality by tape (DV or HDV) based camcorders.

Having said that though, JVC's upcoming GZ-HD7 looks promising since it offers a higher bitrate than HDV (tape) camcorders and features 3CCDs.