Picking The Most Suitable Video Camera

Feb.09, 2009 in Computers

You have determined that you want to set about recording live events in moving images for the first time, but what kind of video camera should you buy? The answer to such a question can become very long rather quickly, so here I’ll try to give you something to get started.

To begin with, let’s assume that what you are looking for is a small, portable, video camera - something suitable to have with you on the vacation as well as your kid’s next soccer game. Let’s also assume that, instead of messing with discs or tapes something that will record to a physical memory on the device itself, and allow for transferring this to external memory options if you so desire. In the name of maximum compatibility you don’t want something that you will need a specific program for using on your computer. Today we want to plug right into our computer, and use the material in the way we want.

There’e certainly more than one camera that will fit the bill, and what you go for will be largely dependent on how good you want the end result to look. For projects shot in low resolution, for ordinary TV’s, Ipods or the Web, something along the lines of those new flip video cameras would serve nicely. On the other hand, if you desire Full HD picture quality for displaying on your brand new flat screen, you might be better of with a camera recording in the Avchd file format. This means you also need avchd compatible video editing software, but that is quickly becoming a well accepted standard.

High Definition Becomes the Standard

Allthough everybody talks about high definition these days, you may be surprised to know that it is not a particularly new term. In fact it was used way back in the 1930s when the British 405 line (black and white) TVs where introduced. Their resolution was higher than on the older sets, so thus it was called “high definition”.

Nonetheless, high defintion can mean technically different things, depending upon who talks about it and in which context.

Fundamentally, high definition television is the most evolved form of digital television, that has surfaced so far. It makes full use of the 16:9 aspect ratio, just like in the cinema, that is standard on all new television screens. The resolution has been bumped up to five times from ordinary (SD) resolution, which on a big enough screen is a great improvement indeed. Simply put - high definition is the best available picture on a television. Nevertheless, there are three separate variants of it: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. The latter is the one referred to as “full hd” and is what new blu-ray movies are offered in.

The format to work with the avchd video codec, is typically 1080i. More reading on video recording and editing is obtainable here.