«Surprised at quality»
I bought a top of the line SD camera with a 50 zoom. I could not stand the "video tape quality" of the video so I got this HD one. I am new to camcorders but good with electronics. I am amazed with the quality of the sound and HD video. The controls seem quite intuitive and I think they have got their act together. I am not easy to please but if this holds up over time I will be further amazed as things are not built to last these days. This is not good. Have to have the AVCHD recorder DW100 to use this. Seems most Bluray players play AVCHD these days.
[Sunday, December 28, 2008]
|
«Very Good Quality»
Very good quality, I played it on my samsung HDTV...the picture is stunning. A UV FIlter is definitely a neccessity. Must buy extra battery with more juice. The only bad thing is the software that is included, better buy Sony Vegas 9.0 the version that edits AVCHD and I will wait until BD Write is cheaper to burn it.
[Saturday, December 27, 2008]
|
«Beautiful Video Saved to SDHC Cards & Standard DVDs»
I purchased the Canon VIXIA HF10 a few days ago and wanted to mention a few things about it as well as some points about burning the video to standard DVDs in the highest quality possible using Video Studio 11.5.
What's hot: Amazing full 1080i video quality in good lighting; "easy mode" recording if you don't want to adjust the settings manually (seems to work pretty well); ability to save to cheap external SDHC flash drive cards for long-term storage (I use 8gb class 4 cards, which stores 1 hour of HD video and can be purchased on-line for about $10.00 each; just make sure you "initialize" (format) them before recording to them; the ability to watch the video recorded to SDHC cards on my PS3 - just plug in to the built in reader, pick the video in the menu, and play (note that not all versions of the PS3 have the SDHC readers built in and I don't know if a USB card reader will work, but I would think it should).
What's not hot: Although you can take still pics while videotaping, they are lower resolution shots; you can only take high resolution pics by switching the HF10 to camera mode (not a big deal for me as I bought this for videos - not still pics). From what some others have written (consumers and pros), HF10 video recorded in low lighting is superior to video recorded in low lighting by many other HD camcorders, though you will still notice a significant reduction in quality when shooting in low lighting situations (however, I have not tried making manual adjustments that undoubtedly will improve the quality of the video). The HF10 does not recorded in 5.1 surround sound like some of its competitors, though the quality of the stereo audio is excellent. Expensive proprietary batteries (but see this e-bay deal for an excellent price for a high-capacity battery and charger: [....] which was still available as of 12-26-08).
Notes on Burning AVCHD High Def Video from the HF10 to Standard DVDs:
Although I plan on storing my videos on 8gb SDHC flash drive cards (which reportedly hold 1 hour of 1080 HD video) and then burning them to Blu-ray disks in a year or two (after the disks and burner prices come down), I wanted to test burning AVCHD video produced by the Canon VIXIA HF10 at its highest setting (FXP mode) onto to a standard DVD. I haven't tried the bundled burning software yet (I've seen lots of complaints about it) but I have Video Studio 11.5, which handles AVCHD video recorded by the HF10. I noticed some people have stated that the quality of AVCHD video burned by Nero 8 is slightly superior to that burned by Video Studio 11.5 Although I don't have Nero 8 and thus can't make that comparison, my guess is that people who have compared the video quality produced by the two programs did not manually adjut the settings for Video Studio 11.5 to output the highest quality video possible (the default quality setting is 720 instead of full 1080). Unlike when burning standard video disks, the menus for making the adjustments in Video Studio are only available at the very last disk-burning step. They are located on the bottom left of the disk-burning window, on the same "row" as the Back and Close buttons (you can see some screenshots: [...]. Click on the Settings & Options tab, and then the Disk Template Options tab. Under Compression, set the Video Data Rate to Constant / 18000 and set the Compression value to 100. Under the General tab, change the Frame Size from 1440x1880 to 1920x1080. Then before burning click on the Project Settings tab and click on Change to make sure you see the new settings. That's it! I compared the video on the DVD to the video stored on the SDHC card on my PS3 and I am happy to report that I was unable to detect any difference in quality between the original video on the SDHC flash drive card and the video I burned to a standard DVD using Video Studio 11.5. Note that I rendered the video using Video Studio on a HP Pavillion m8000n PC with 2 gigs of memory, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Dual Core Processor, and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS graphics card. The size of the video was a little more than a gigabyte and it took several hours to render and burn it (unfortunately, I cannot say exactly how long it took as my PC went into sleep mode, probably for about 45 minutes before I realized it, so it probably took around 3 hours to render).
[Saturday, December 27, 2008]
|
