Note: Before I begin, for those of you who just want to watch the video and can’t be bothered to read all of this, scroll to the bottom of the article and you’ll find links to the video there.
I’ve finally had a chance to use the camera and get to grips with filming without a tape. So far, I’m really impressed with it. The quality is amazing especially compared to my previous cameras but the quality comes at a price – my PC struggles to edit the footage. My PC isn’t a slacker either, it may be three years old but it is still a Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4Ghz with 4GB DDR2 RAM. The graphics card may be the culprit being an oldish NVidia GeForce 7600 GS. Adobe Premiere Pro can just about edit the AVCHD footage from the camcorder in a very low ‘preview’ resolution and quality, and I can play the footage back once rendered in to MPEG2 (at HD quality of course).
Let’s start with the bad points: The cold-shoe attachment is separate to the camera and slots in a fitting on the side. The fitting itself is covered by a flimsy bit of plastic which, for the price of the camera, could have been a bit better. The dial which lets you choose between record, photo and playback modes is in a slightly awkward position when filming but I can live with that. The final sore point is lack of a function allowing you to resume recording a particular file when you power the camera on. If you film like me, then you’ll record for a few seconds, pause, record again, maybe switch off to conserve battery, power on again and record some more. Each time the camera is powered off between shots, a new video file is created on the internal memory. In the sample video below, which is only 1 minute 18 seconds long, I had to edit down 21 separate video files to create it. Longer videos are going to be a bit tricky.
So, good points… the camera records to the built in 32GB of memory and has an SD slot allowing you to add another 64GB if you wish. Face tracking is a neat addition which allows you to tap a face on the screen and the camera will track the focus of that person. Even better, if you preset your family’s faces in to the camera’s memory, it will prioritise their faces above others around you using face recognition. This is a bit hit and miss to be honest and requires you to take many pictures of a person from many angles in order to work properly.
Still photos are very good and can rival an average compact. Don’t expect amazing SLR style results, but colour tones are accurate and resolution is good. It even has a built in flash.
Overall I’m very pleased with it.. I’m sticking to recording in 1080i at the moment as the Full HD 1080p mode is both impossible to edit on my PC and very space hungry on storage. I’m having to render the final video in MPEG2 as the superior (in quality per megabyte) h264 codec also won’t play back on my PC. Both formats play back fine on my PS3 streaming over my home network perfectly. I don’t yet have a Blu-Ray writer so am unable to create fancy Blu-Rays, but I’ve a feeling that optical disc storage is not the future as I’ve been using file-based video storage for years now and only burning the videos to DVD as a back up and for sending to family members.
Right.. here’s my first HD video, recorded yesterday morning at Dunraven Bay which turned out to be the location of a Doctor Who episode last night too… coincidence? The episode was filmed on some rocks only a few metres from where Poppy is digging in the sand. The video is hosted by YouTube and Facebook and the original file is nearly 300MB which took forever to upload. Hmm, broadband really does need to catch up with HD video’s needs. They have compressed the video considerably, so the original file I have on my PC is much better quality but I think you get the general idea.
Click here to watch the video on YouTube. You’ll want to set the playback size to 1080p as shown in this picture in order to see it in HD quality.
Click here to watch the video on Facebook (you’ll need a Facebook account).
In both cases, you’ll get the full effect if you maximise the video to full screen.
