My first camcorder

[Sphexi]

I've had digital cameras for years now, my Canon A95 is fantastic and even being dropped a few times has never failed me. But our daughter is almost a year old, is starting to walk, and her first birthday is coming up, and little 20-30 second videos just don't cut it. If I drop the resolution to the lowest, the camera can keep up, but the quality is horrible and the audio just sucks.

So I started looking for camcorders, I would've liked a harddrive based one, but they're fairly expensive, and I don't like the fact that if I'm out somewhere and fill it up, I'm stuck until I get home. So I went with the Sony DCR-HC21, which is a MiniDV tape based unit, and despite being an older unit at this point works perfectly for what I need it for.

USB and Firewire
Decent battery life (extra batteries are cheap on ebay, and last a long time)
30xOpt/800xDig Zoom
Touchscreen interface (not spectacular, but once you play with it you actually start to like it)
The "Easy" mode is just wonderful

I've taken videos with it already, figured out how to download them to my computer and edit them, and ran them through a re-encoder to drop the size of the files without losing any quality. Overall I'm very happy, especially when I paid a LOT less for this camcorder than I would've for more "modern" units, which I noticed don't come with USB interfaces for the most part. Since I'm up in Canada, stuff is a bit more expensive, new top of the line DV based camcorders run $450+, low end versions about $370 or so, I got this for under $300 with taxes and tapes. It was brand new still, just discontinued.



Any advice on software that will interface with the camcorder and copy video from it onto my computer? It comes with very basic stuff that works, but not all that well, plus an hour of video will take up something like 50GB or so. I'd rather use software that encodes it on the fly so it doesn't take up much space.

 

[gsellis]

50GB? Something is not right.

If you use any, such as Windows Movie Maker, Sony Movie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead, or Adobe Premiere Elements, it should be 13GB/hr of tape. That is the normal size of DV-AVI. With the exception of Movie Maker (Vista version excluded), all of those packages will also export to DVD. I prefer Pinnacle Studio, but non-linear editors have a personal preference factor and work with different hardware in different ways. If you look, you may find trial versions.

And note that USB is about transferring stills from memory. Firewire is about transferring video. Even if you have a choice of using USB, use Firewire.

 

[Sphexi]

Originally posted by: gsellis
50GB? Something is not right.

If you use any, such as Windows Movie Maker, Sony Movie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead, or Adobe Premiere Elements, it should be 13GB/hr of tape. That is the normal size of DV-AVI. With the exception of Movie Maker (Vista version excluded), all of those packages will also export to DVD. I prefer Pinnacle Studio, but non-linear editors have a personal preference factor and work with different hardware in different ways. If you look, you may find trial versions.

And note that USB is about transferring stills from memory. Firewire is about transferring video. Even if you have a choice of using USB, use Firewire.

Well that's kind of weird, since I've only plugged into the USB jack, and I've downloaded plenty of video from it. I can control the camera through the USB cord, sync up audio/video, record it to the computer, whatever I want. Looks perfectly fine on the computer too. It just takes up quite a bit of space, a 1 minute file seems to run about 350MB on average. For some reason the program that records to the computer says I only have an hour's worth of space, although I have about 60GB free right now, probably it just estimates it.

I'll check to see if I can get some trials of the ones you listed, or if someone I know has a copy that I can check out at their place, I have programs that I use for editing and whatnot, but none of them seem to support an external camera.

 

[gsellis]

It must be the App that came with the camera. If you use any other editor, they will not see the camera without firewire. My HDR-HC7 actually came with a firewire cable, which was the first Sony I bought that did (came with almost all the cables - it was almost a shock to the system - so Un-Sony-like.)

 

[Sphexi]

Must be, this one came with a USB cable, no Firewire. I'm tempted to get one just to see if it's any better, but my friend has one for his camcorder, and he has Pinnacle Studio 10 or something, I'll try it out and see how well it works. The Sony software isn't too horrible, it works for what I need, and when it's on the computer I just toss it into MediaCoder and turn it into an AVI anyways to save space.

 

[Sphexi]

Well, my friend actually has Pinnacle 11, and you were right, it doesn't recognize my camera through USB as a "DV Camcorder", but in the sources selecetion I could select the Sony drivers that were installed, and the USB Audio device that is apparantly my camcorder. Only drawback is that I can't control the camcorder in the software, I hit capture then hit play on the camcorder and let it run it's course.

On the plus side, it does a MUCH better job capturing, editing and compressing video. Lots of options, and it says it'll hold 5 times as much as Sony's default program.

 

[gsellis]

Cool. Still, watch carefully and if you have any issues, get firewire. What you do want to watch for is Out Of Sync (OOS) audio and video. It will happen on long captures and be noticible at the end. USB captures can lead to it, but it can be other problems too (HHD too full, audio chipset not optimal).