Dirty Danza I've listened to enough of your shit...
 

And you've convinced me that the Canon Vixia 30 was the right video camera for me.. Thanks man! It's been working like a charm. I went out on the weekend and grabbed a firewire 800 card, took forever to find one dunno why.. The 400's were everywhere, but nobody had an 800.. I could only find one, and it was a PCI-Express model.. I grabbed it, haven't plugged it in yet though.

Anyways thanks for all your advice Danza, much appreciated man!

Oh and thanks to Fuzebox and Zombiegirl too, for letting you play with their camera :)

fake drama .. get 500 links below

where did you get yours?

Henrys?

they have it at henrys for 799$ i might pick it up

I have the hv20----its just a sweet cam.

How much better is the new 30?

tell me who are you dissing...maybe im missin...the reason that your smiling
when i flow like a mudslide..when i get on i like to fly and glide

Love our HV30 for portability + video quality... Can just throw it in my laptop case when travelling and do some shoots on the road.

Or film Danza doing wheelies on a 18" high 50cc bike :1orglaugh

Yeah I got it at Henry's, figured best place and the price was right. The only thing I had to get over was that it looks like a toy, not a professional camera. Like buying a little pocket digital camera VS a digital SLR. Quality is great though, it's pretty much dominated the market. I used to own a $5,000 (at the time) Canon GL-1 which looks a lot more pro, but the Vixia wipes the floor with it for video quality nowadays.

There is a Sony that's comparable and looks like it's built a bit better, less plastic etc.. But it was maybe $400-500 more, and I just didn't really see the need. I just use it to capture some moments while my baby is still a baby. :) The sony has a nicer, larger LCD too that was calling my name

Also at the advice of Danza I went with the tape model for a number of reasons.. Tapes are literally $2 if you order online, and record 60 minutes. Once you've filled up a tape, it's already archived. That was the big kicker for me. The HDD models sound cool, but I don't wanna have to bring a laptop with me on vacation to keep transferring stuff off, and even if you do that at home, it's going to your PC HDD.. Not really safe for long term storage. So then you have to burn it all off on DVD's or setup a RAID station, it's just messy. The ones that record to DVD only record 20 minutes to each DVD.. So fuck that.

Tapes I can just pop out and put em on the shelf for many years to come. I know they'll degrade over decades, but I can live with that vs losing it all in a HD crash

one thing... always use the same tape from now on... don't switch over to whats cheap at the time and you will get double the use from your camera and time on your tapes...

personally I use all sony tapes... thats personal preference.. I hear great stories from the costco maxell tapes.. what ever it is just stay consistent.. reason is each tape mfg uses different lubes and metals in the tape.. so when you start switching you start cross contanmniating and gets all gunky.. also run a head cleaner through every 10 hours.. (5 tapes , capture 5 tapes it's 5 hours then to capture to pc is another 5 hours on the heads)

Very good points

Nice tip there. I had no idea about that.

:)

what brand of firewire 800 card did you get?

Tony Danza Posts here or is it his Kid?

The hv20/30s are great cams but this year's batch of avchd cams really give them a run for their money. Canon dropped the ball a bit on the hf10/hf100 but Sony's sr11/sr12 is proper.

I need some thing for home use

Prefer a HD camera that can capture 1920*1200 with a Hard Disk. What is a good one to look at. Are those JVC's any good (around 1500$)

Jay

I'd recommend the Sony hdr-sr11/hdr-sr12. Identical except for 60gb and 120gb hdd respectively. Handles up to 1080i60.

Glad you like the cam, I love it... i no longer have to tote around my big ass camera bag when I'm travelling now!! Just in case someone peed their pants, lol.

vixia 30 and hdr-sr11 get about the same reviews

How is the editing work flow. I assume you need Sony Vegas.

One of the biggest issues I have right now with MiniDV is that all my videos just stay on tape and never get watched again (I am talking about family stuff i shot in the past 6 years). About 6 months ago I sent about 60 tapes to some company that converted them to DVD at 20 bucks, since I have a 4 year old both grandparents want copies etc.

Need a easy solulution that i can shoot, edit and burn dvd

jay

Definitely hardware intensive, the more cores you can get on it the better.

Ulead and Pinnacle have avchd supportm as well as Vegas. But none of them support smart rendering yet so even for simple edits on a decent machine you are probably looking at 3-10x real time to render a project.

CyberLink PowerDirector would probably be the easiest way to author to DVD. It looks like there's a patch that supports smart rendering but it's not widely available yet. Of course that's not much help if you are authoring mpeg-2 rather than avchd.