Fastpitch Softball

[hanger4]

I’m looking for a camcorder to film sporting events, most notably fastpitch softball. I’ll mostly be recording the games to get the best still shots from the video and of coarse some short clips. I’d like the still shots to be 640 by 480 minimum. These clips and pics will be put on CD for the players. Have looked at digital cameras but the ones with a burst rate fast enough are way out of my wallet. Need to know what to look for in the camcorder, 3CCD. 1CCD, number of recording pixels, DV, DVD. Any fingers pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

[racer-x]

I video a lot of sports.........baseball, football soccer ect. My camera is a Panasonic pv-dv953. It is a 3-CCD camera that can shoot in "Frame Mode". It was $1200 when I bought it, but you can probably find one around $800. It's a great camera that's perfect for what you wnt to do.

I always shoot in Frame Mode then encode as Progressive. The stills I get out of the video are very good quality. The extracted frame is 720 x 480, but I resize them to 720 x 540 to get them back to the propper 4:3 aspect ratio. I use the stills for DVD menus, slideshows, cover art or just print them out.

Remember; if you shoot in Frame Mode, you'll never have to de-interlace the images.