Movies from modestly priced "still" cameras

[Dave Watterson]

Setting aside those top-of-the-market still cameras which many lovers of the highest image quality love ... even very modestly priced "still" cameras these days offer SD and HD video capability. But so far as I can tell almost all of them record at 30fps. They often seem to generate .MOV files ... presumably in NTSC format though the specs don't make that clear. (I have seen one saying it offers PAL audio.)

What are the implications for UK users? Has anyone practical experience to share?

- Dave

[Geoff Addis]

I believe that most modern DVD/Bluray players will accept 30p and playback well on UK televisions. Just to liven debate a little, I wonder if perhaps we should all record in 30p rather than 25p as the horrible stuttering that 25p introduces is far less obvious in 30p and modern LCD and plasma displays operate in the progressive mode anyway. Thought?!

Geoff

[Brian Saberton]

My Nikon D90 records video as an AVI (yippee!!). The clips run ok on my editing programme which is set up for PAL so I'm assuming it's recording in PAL.

[Pqtrick]

I believe I raised this sometime ago and you responded Dave. I can't readily find the post. I mentioned that I had a Panasonic Lumix FZ28 camera with a video facility. The quality is very good. It produces an Apple QuickTime .MOV file at 30fps. You can select for output either as PAL or NTS what's it? The American system.

The question was how on earth do you edit this?

You may have seen my meanderings which have culminating in me trying Vegas Movie Studio. Purely as an exercise, I have pointed this camera out of the window and taken some shots in PAL at 30fps. The using Vegas I have dragged the .MOV files into the programme cut and chopped it to see if it works and then saved it as both a windows media file and also connected my DV camera and written it back to tape and then played it on the TV. It works. It is not obviously HD but at least I know it is do-able with this camera now.

I think that if I went the way of purchasing a new bit of kit, being also interested in still images I could be looking for a camera of this type. I was interested in reading Col Lamb's article recently but I think we should be cautious that we can handle the files once we have them.

Also going back to Vegas Movie Studio, I found an unmarked CD which in fact was a DVD I had shot and edited a number of years ago. The original tape had been chewed in an older DV camera. I dragged the contents off the DVD and can re-edit if I want to. Amazing this technology. Although I still have not settled the problem with the graphics card driver timing out on my PC!

[col lamb]

Dave

I bought my Wife a Panasonic ZX1 at £200 about 18 months ago. This is now a superseeded model by a few in the £200 price range.

MOV files edit great in Edius Neo on my Edit PC without Transcoding, I can mix and match any material on the timeline and Edius will playback OK and transcode the edited footage to whatever I want

The original source files play directly on our plasma TV from the ZX1 with no problems.

With the latest Quicktime player installed on my non-edit internet PC the files playback great.

As you can expect the sound is nowhere near a dedicated camcorder but still just passable if it is only the video that matters.