Marti's blog

A brief update on my first experiments (just 16 minutes of filming so far... all in 25p mode).

The good : The picture quality outdoor is absolutely stunning ! Everything is very detailed, textures are realistic and vivid. This is a huge step forward compared to any DV camcorder.

The bad : 4 Gb for 16 minutes of footage... Even DVD-R are not enough for archiving, hard drives are the only option.

The ugly : Filming done indoor shows some noise, and it gets quite serious if the room is a bit dim. This is something that you can't escape with any camcorder, camera or even old-fashioned analog film, but after the beautiful video you get with bright light, it's a disappointment. Also the soundtrack has a slight background noise (maybe the camcorder tape turning ?), but maybe an external mic can fix that.

For importing the MPEG2 video inside my PC, I used HDVSplit which is a free and simple, no-nonsense application for extracting the video. I didn't need to install any Windows driver, read any help file or had anything to configure, it just worked right away and saved every sequence into its own file with time and date in the filename.