What are the advantages of using a DSLR camera for video capture?

[Wile_E]

What are the advantages of the new DSLR cameras that have 1080p video capture? Why are people using them instead of a dedicated camcorder? I am seeing more people, especially wedding photographers post videos on websites using these new cameras. One person was using a Glidecam camera stabilizer with their Canon 5D Mark II.

[hech54]

Technology marches on. A fantastic digital still camera that takes pretty damn impressive video(though still limited compared to a dedicated video cam)?
Why not? It's a no-brainer really. How often do people fully utilize the abilities of their video cams?

[DereX888]

Most of people taking home videos never edit them nor create any "semi-pro" edited videos. I know no one in my family does
Digital still camera's ability to take good or acceptable quality videos is a god-send to most of people.

Now, the "wedding videographers" and other supposedly "pro" people using such hard to edit, highly compressed videomaking toys as their professional tools? LOL
Apparently they as professional as i.e. women dancing at the pole in a strip joints and compared to the pro dancers on the stage of say Russian National Ballet Theater Both are "pros" but their skills and abilities obviously have nothing in common
Advantages? Plenty for "average consumers". None for "professionals" (disadvantages rather).

[hech54]

hard to edit, highly compressed videomaking toys as their professional tools? LOL

I've done quite extensive editing with my Canon's MJEG output stuff and it's not difficult
at all...BUT I do wholeheartedly believe that "HD" or Hi Def" footage cannot be stored on a CF or SD card.
Compressed footage is NOT "HD" as far as I'm concerned. How many minutes of a footage ripped
from a Blu-Ray movie can you fit on your CF card?

[DereX888]

hard to edit, highly compressed videomaking toys as their professional tools? LOL

I've done quite extensive editing with my Canon's MJEG output stuff and it's not difficult
at all...BUT I do wholeheartedly believe that "HD" or Hi Def" footage cannot be stored on a CF or SD card.
Compressed footage is NOT "HD" as far as I'm concerned. How many minutes of a footage ripped
from a Blu-Ray movie can you fit on your CF card?

"My"? I don't use such toys

BTW I think most of "prosumer" cameras use various MPEG-4 compressions, your camera's MJPEG compression is probably way superior to most of them.
These cameras have nothing in common with actual "Hi Def" quality, they only match the HD resolution (with mere 1280x720 usually), just yet-another marketing gimmick for the masses

I can't imagine "HD" movie captured at ~1Mbps LOL, but that's me. I'm sure it is of "perfect HD quality" to many people, same as VCDs or Divx copies were of exactly the same quality as the source DVD

[hech54]

BTW I think most of "prosumer" cameras use various MPEG-4 compressions, your camera's MJPEG compression is way superior to most of them. They have nothing in common with actual "Hi Def" quality, they only match the HD resolution (with mere 1280x720 usually)

I just see SOOOO many manufacturers putting "HD Video" on their merchandising
jargon when the camera or camcorder fits in your pocket and records to an SD Card.
That annoys me....

[DereX888]

BTW I think most of "prosumer" cameras use various MPEG-4 compressions, your camera's MJPEG compression is way superior to most of them. They have nothing in common with actual "Hi Def" quality, they only match the HD resolution (with mere 1280x720 usually)

I just see SOOOO many manufacturers putting "HD Video" on their merchandising
jargon when the camera or camcorder fits in your pocket and records to an SD Card.
That annoys me....

Yeah, I know what you mean.
Just few months ago I had really hard time to find HD camcorder at retail stores, 99.99% of sales people had no clue what I was looking for, they all wanted to sell me some dumb camera with "HD video" capability - and that's aside of the fact that I actually wanted HDV format