I've been using iMovie, an Apple product, to quickly bang out the podcasts on over on Muscle Ventures. One feature I've noted about iMovie is that its native format is DV, i.e., the stuff that comes out of your digital camcorder.
Now, I have been capturing videos by using the movie feature of my mass market Casio Exilim EX-Z750. I can get up to 30 minutes video on a 1 GB memory card The Casio does not use the uncompressed DV format but rather uses an AVI container with a highly compressed MPEG-4 video. I've noticed that getting this into iMovie requires about 1 minute per minute of video. Shoot a 20 minute video, count on at least 20 minutes to convert the footage. On a side note, the footage will play immediately in Quicktime, seemingly the Swiss Army Knife of all things video, so you can decide if it is any good before committing to the conversion.
Well, conversion has been a headache. Further, shooting video on a still camera is temperamental at best, particularly in low light situations (below 100 lux). So, I decided to run an experiment with a super low-end camcorder we bought last year. I'm in the middle of the experiment, but I have an initial observation. Camcorders, even digital ones, are not really made for shooting film that is going to appear on anything other than a TV or simulated TV. The device is built for shooting in landscape mode and only landscape mode. However, there are plenty of times when the situation calls for portrait mode. It's just more efficient for capturing standing full body shots. Further, why be constrained to a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. That all feels like it should be mutable.
My guess is that I am likely to stick with movie mode on mass market still cameras. They're definitley limited in terms of the quality of the video, but they allow me more flexibility in the size and angle of image I capture. What I'd really like is a video-oriented camera built for people who are mainly going to broadcast on the Internet. That camera would have mutable aspect ratios that allowed me to capture the highest resolution the camera was capable of for the area I wanted to video. It would be small and portable. It would have excellent low-light performance. It would capture a minimum 30 minutes of video on a 1 GB card. I'm actually willing to compromise on the last point as well as the mutable aspect ratio which sounds a little pie-in-the-sky.
This may be worth checking out. It doesn't quite meet all the above criteria, but it's ridiculously cheap. Target seems to be the main retailer at the moment.
Pure Digital Point and Shoot : http://www.puredigitalinc.com/products/pandsvideo/index.html
Posted by: Scott | May 11, 2006 at 03:03