Your Camcorder and Editing
From an editing point of view, there are 3 categories of features in a camcorder that will effect your editing:
- Features that effect the quality of the image
- Features that improve your ability to shoot good video
- Features that allow easy transfer to your computer
Features that effect quality of image
1 CCD or 3 CCD?
Most mini-camcorders have 1 chip for all 3 colors (Red, Green, Blue). 3 CCD camera have one chip for each color so the quality of recorded video is better. A few years ago, only prosumer cameras had 3 chips. However, Panasonic just released their 3 chip consumer mini last year and all the other camcorder makers will follow.
Should I buy a prosumer or consumer video camera?
Consumer mini-camcorder definitely. Mini-camcorders are 3 times cheaper and easier to carry.
A consumer camcorder has a fixed lens which means you can't remove the video lens on the camera. A prosumer camera has a lens that you can remove and change out. Yes, prosumer cameras captures better video, but what you gain in video quality, you loose in portability.
The definition of mini is that it's about the size of your palm. You do not want to lug a prosumer sized video camera around China. They're big and expensive. One of the smallest prosumer cameras, the Canon GL2, is the size of a big toaster. Trust me, you don't want to carry that around for 2 weeks.
Lastly, a consumer camera can be bought at any retail electronics chain. Prosumer cameras are specialty store items.
Features that effect you ability to shoot good video
Mini-DV Tape or Mini DVD Rewritable?
The size of captured DV (digital video) footage runs about 1 Gigabyte/minute.
Mini-DV tape lengths are 60 minutes or 80 minutes. Like video tapes that you use to record your favorite TV show, the quality at which you record determines how many minutes you can fit on a mini-DV tape.
At full quality a 60 minute tape records, 60 minutes of video (i.e. 60 Gigs worth of footage). Mini-DVDs are 1.47 Gigabytes. So recording at the full quality of a mini-DV tape, the mini-DVDs would only be able to record 90 seconds of video. So in order to record a decent amount of time, the mini-DVD camcorders compress and convert the video into a lower quality format like MPG-1 which is smaller in size and contain less video information compared to DV format which is the format of mini-DV tapes.
Any time you compress an image, you lose video quality. The advantage of CD-based camcorders is that you don't need to capture the video to your computer, you should be able to just drag and drop the video file from the CD onto your computer.
Features that allow easy transfer to your computer
If you're a PC user, buy a camcorder that has USB 2.0 output. For Mac users, it doesn't matter since Firewire input comes standard with all Macs, but not with all PCs.