Camera basics for me the beginner

[Mylo]

Hey guys

This may be a very dumb post, but since it's all practically newbie stuff I will be asking, my guess is at least one of you will get to read it and answer...

At the moment, I have shit for camera, some crappy miniDV Canon MV 901 brick that I don't even know how I got. I did some video material for certain client with it, since it was low budget. It turned out pretty lousy as far as I care, but client loved it. OK.

Anyway, since that was my first time "filming" my own material that needs to be edited, I was sort of excited with the whole process, mainly because you got all these ideas in the meantime doing it.

So I noticed some things on that camera...it's lazy. The shots I took were mostly "action", constant and rapid movement. I was on a boat, and the watercrafts were buzzing around.

The minute I started transferring the video over firewire to PC, the preview dissapointed me. As if half of the frames were missing.

Even with deinterlace filter, it seemed like it lacks frames, it wasn't "fluid"...I don't know if that's the correct term but I think you understand what I'm talking about.

What differs cameras, what to look for, to have that better or more natural motion recording? Maybe I'm "spoiled" watching those fancy HD videos...

Another thing except for that motion problem is something I would describe as "lagging". Sometimes it seems if I really move the cam over the scene fast, that it sort of "pulls" the frame I was steady on, for a brief second.

So, what feature of camera affects that, how's that called when I'm looking into specs?

Also - this is pretty general question, but would you even consider buying a photo camera like Canon 5D that can take some very high quality videos, or is that throwing money away - in terms of having camera and photo in one?

PS - I couldn't find the answer on Vimeo - do they allow the upload a video that I took and put other people's music in the background?

[zoobie]

sounds like the computer couldn't handle the transfer
to keep it fluid, keep it interlaced
you're spoiled with HD because using a tripod is almost required for anything of quality

suggest you start reading which saves you tons of money with this stuff
www.camcorderinfo.com
uh... www.hv20.com
uh... www.sonyhdvinfo.com
uh...

[edDV]

Nothing to do with the camera so long as it plays OK to a TV.

The problem is the computer's progressive display and the way you are playing it.

In other words, if you bring it in over IEEE-1394 and edit on the computer, then export back to the camcoder over IEEE-1394, it will still play smoothly when played to a TV.

To deal with 480i/576i interlace video on a PC you need to use a deinterlacing player and an edit program that supports native DV editing. Good programs like Vegas or Premiere allow real time preview out the IEEE-1394 port while editing. This type of preview works great without deinterlace artifacts.


BTW: An HDV or AVCHD camcorder will have equal issues and more because of MPeg2 compression.