DCR TRV14 questions

[Daminator]

I'm brand new to camcorders, and hadn't even heard of MiniDV until a couple of days ago, so I'm a total newbie. I have just ordered a Sony DCR-TRV14 and have a couple of questions about it.

1) I'm going to want to be taking footage of skiing. Are there any settings I need to change to do that better (like I change the exposure settings on my digital camera)?

2) Time lapse photography. From what I have read, the time lapse feature on the recorder is only accurate to about +/- 6 frames. Is there any way to get it more accurate than this? If not, the only thing I can think of doing is recording , say, 2 seconds of film per time span that I want, and then finding some program that can pic out one frame every 2 seconds, or delete 49 out of every 50 frames. There must be some way around it.

3) What's software recommendations do you have as I heard that the software that's bundled isn't too hot. I have Adobe Premier, but that never seemed to handle MPEG2 very well. Will MPEG2 be the main format I'll be using with DV? And I seem to see Pinnacle Studio mentioned a lot. Is that a Premier type of program or different? Is that a app I should go for?

Thanks a lot
Damian
www.daminator.com

[Tommyknocker]

As far as filming skiing, check to see if there is a sports setting for your camera. The "shutter" speed is increased to capture the action better, while sacrificing light. No big deal in ski shooting as the light is rarely ever a problem.

To try to answer both questions two and three at once, in a statement, let them pry Premiere from your cold dead hand. That monster still sets the pace for editing, so be hard-pressed to try something else. Study all the tutorials you can (there are so many, thank goodness), and you wou won't be disappointed.

The main type of video you will be working with is DV AVI, your camera will transfer it to your computer via a firewire cable. Edit in this format, and change only to MPEG-2 when you are ready to burn your finished product to DVD.

While you wait for your new toy to arrive, make sure you have plenty of hard drive space, as DV video takes up a lot of space. Try to get a second hard drive if you do not have one already. Use the second drive for video only, and it should be at least 80 GB, and 120 GB is even better. Defrag both drives, and if you will be burning DVDs, get the RWs as well as Rs as beginners tend to make a few errors starting out, and RWs are reuseable

[Daminator]

Thanks for that feedback Tommyknocker. I'm feeling better about having Premier now Although I do sometimes have problems with it when editing compressed files. It's great with raw data.

The main questions I have now are not camera specific, so I think I should start a couple of new threads.