recommendation for a good standard definition camcorder

[anandadevapriya]

i am editing with final cut express on a powerbook G4 1.67 GHz powerpc (not intel core) with 1 GB DDR SDRAM memory - so I am not yet equipped to work with HD video. I am interested however in switching from using a miniDV camcorder to one with built in memory - in order to have the possibility to simplify and speed up capture time. However, it is important to me to be able to edit the video easily- so to have it in a format that can be imported into final cut express and edited. any suggestions? i used a friend's camcorder - but it generated very strange files with a .MOI extension and they were not really editable... i also want decent quality. mostly i export them to vimeo, but sometimes to dvds, and sometimes for projecting with a digital projector.

Thank you!
Didi

 

[LethalWolfe]

I am interested however in switching from using a miniDV camcorder to one with built in memory - in order to have the possibility to simplify and speed up capture time. However, it is important to me to be able to edit the video easily...

Unfortunately those are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you want the best quality and the easiest to work with format you need a MiniDV camera. SD cameras that record to memory cards, internal HDDs or mini-DVDs are difficult to work with on Macs and record to inferior codecs compared to DV.


Lethal

 

[anandadevapriya]

other formats?

Thank you - the camera i was considering was a sony handycam hdr-cx100 but it generates mpeg-2 files - which i understand require a lot of converting etc to be able to use for editing- which does defeat the whole purpose...which codecs from the tapeless camcorders are edit-able - i mean even high end users have to run the files through a converter to do their editing?

 

[LethalWolfe]

All of the tapeless SD cameras are based off of DVD-quality or lower MPEG-2 which requires transcoding into another codec (most commonly people transcode into DV) and the MPEG-2 is not as good of quality as DV.


Lethal