Next time you go to Best Buy or Circuit City, stop by the digial video camera sections and play around with the new Hard Drive Disk cameras. They are amazing.
I recently bought the Sony HDR-SR1 and was stunned at the video quality.
8 Inch Tv Monitor
I shot some footage in my back yard to test it and I focused in on my vegatable garden and got some amazing close-ups of the leaves and foliage and the clarity and details with no ghosting or bluring is amazing.
Welcome to the future of digital HDD video cameras.
The Sony HDR-SR1 is a Hard Drive Disk camera. It only records pictures (4 megapixel) and video files. The video can be recoreded in SD or HD. SD is for Standard definition, which you'll find on my digital video camera now, that use DV tape. HD is High Definition.
The simplicity of an onboard hard drive makes using this camera a true "snap"
I just film a video, and use the touch screen technology to navigate my past videos and can play them right into the LCD monitor.
To transfer the videos to my computer, I just use a USB2 connection and it quickly moves the videos right to my laptop.
Included with the camera is special software which enables me to watch the HD videos on my computer, but I was shocked to find out I could not edit them.
I did an exhaustive search all over the net to find people, discussion forum and software that would do what I needed to do.... edit the ACVHD format and then save it as a file I could upload to google video or youtube.
I was almost ready to tear my hair out, when I discovered the latest version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8 now edits ACVHD video.
You can dumb the video down into just about any popular video format that you would like use for making DVD, that are regular DVD's, not Blue-Ray.
There is a special one touch burn to DVD you can do from the camera, and it will burn the video file to a DVD on your computer. But it turns out, if the video is in HD, the final version DVD will only be able to be seen on Blue-Ray players, which.... most people don't have.
And if you dave right to DVD in SD mode, you lose a lot of the nive HD clarity.
But, nonetheless, using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8 got the job done, and I was able to manipulate and edit the ACVHD files like any other video file, and it was quick and easy.
You can send the completed and edited video to your Hard Drive, back into the camera or to a DVD using the sony program. It will even let you save in HD formats like 1440 x 1080 with 5.1 surround sound.
Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum is so far, one of the simplest ways to edit ACVHD video and manipulate it into other quality video formats.