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Shopping for a camcorder has never been an easy experience, but there has been constant improvement in the quality of video that can be obtained. Before you buy a camera, know what your final destination for your video is. Is it YouTube? Then you won’t need the highest quality camera because this is low resolution video. UPDATE: YouTube recently started offering HD quality video on their site, so high resolution video is now an option. Will you be making a DVD? Then you’ll want to get a high quality camera. Will you just re-watch it on your TV? Make sure you’ve got the right cables to make the connection. If you’ve got an HDTV, you might want to consider and HD camera. If you’re ready to shop you can start with Cnet’s camcorder finder. Otherwise, here’s what to look for in a video camera (also known as camcorders):

• HD – Determine if you want to do HD video or not. The advantages are that you have the high resolution to output to an HDTV. The disadvantage is that HD is a new format with somewhat limited support, and it’s more time consuming to edit.
• Automation – Decide whether you want a camera that you just set on automatic and it does everything for you, or if you want to control exposure, focus, audio, etc. It is strongly recommended that you get a camera that at least gives you manual focus control. Auto-focus is nice, but there will be times when the camcorder won’t know what you are trying to focus on. You can fix bad exposure in a video editing program. You can’t fix focus after the fact.
• Media Types – The ways in which you can store video are constantly evolving. DV Tape, mini-DVD, hard disk, and SD memory cards are all used to store your recorded video. So which one should you choose? Whichever format you decide to go with, make sure you know what you need to transfer your video from the camera to the computer. The new AVCHD format is somewhat problematic because there is still limited support for editing it. Also, you need a very fast machine to edit AVCHD in real-time. Here’s a video round-up of AVCHD editors.
• Audio – Most people don’t think about audio when they look for video cameras, but it is at least equally important. Imagine these two scenarios. Scenario one, you recorded a lecture, but you forgot to take off the lens cap and you only got the audio. Well, that’s a big problem, but you can at least post the audio somewhere and people can listen. Scenario two, you get great video images from your camcorder, but you were far enough away from the speaker that the audio is inaudible. Unless you were going for the silent movie effect, your video is pretty useless. That’s why good audio is so important to good video. Bad audio is very noticeable. Good audio isn’t noticed at all. Look for a camera that has an external microphone input, so you have the option to add a quality microphone. Also look for a camera that has a headphone jack so you can monitor the audio that is being recorded. There’s a good reason why you see professional videographers wearing a set of headphones. They don’t want the surprise of unwanted sounds being captured. A good directional, lapel, or handheld microphone will do better than a camera’s on-board microphone almost every time.
• Image Quality – How important is video image quality to you? Cameras with multiple video sensors will give a better image (generally) than single sensor cameras, but they cost more.
• Photos – Do you want your camcorder to have the ability to take photos too? Keep in mind that you won’t get the resolution (generally) that you get from your digital still camera.
• Image stabilization – There are also cameras with image stabilizers that reduce the shakiness of handheld video, so you may want one with that feature. They’re handy if you are zooming way into the action and you need a steadier shot. They have a limit to how steady the video will appear. Tripods are better tools to use to get steady video.
• Firewire – While firewire connections generally only come on cameras that use the DV format, there is another advantage of having a camera with firewire. You can record live video directly to the hard drive of a computer, or use the camera as a high quality web cam by using the firewire connection.

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Photo by ivan castro guatemala

We live in interesting times (both a blessing and a curse) when it comes to digital video. The first step of any video project is to gather footage of your subject matter. For the past several decades video cameras have been using tape cassettes to save the video onto. In the mid-1990’s, a digital version of tape came into existence to facilitate the transfer to a computer for editing. As I write this in the summer of 2008, there are new storage forms that are gaining traction that do not use tape at all. We also are going through a transition of video resolutions from what is known as standard definition (SD) to high definition (HD). This article will attempt to sort out the storage and resolution issues you should be aware of. When you’re ready to shop for a camcorder, check out the article on what to look for in a camcorder.

Where Digital Video Bits Get Stored

Let’s begin by talking about the ways in which cameras store the video that is recorded. We’ll start by mentioning what is thankfully fading into the past, and that is analog video. That means VHS (including S-VHS) and 8mm (including Hi8) videotape. I say thankfully because of the difficult nature of working with these formats in the digital world that we live in. The difference between these older analog formats and the relatively new digital video (DV) format is that a more complicated digitizing step needed to occur to get the video in a form that can be readily edited with a computer. With digital camcorders, video is already in a format that the computer can understand. The DV format also has the advantage of being higher resolution than either VHS or S-VHS (or 8mm and Hi8).

The disadvantage of the DV format is that there is no high speed transfer of the video to the computer. The digital information is on a linear tape. The video is all transferred in real time, meaning if you took an hour of video on the camcorder, it will take an hour to transfer it to the computer before you can edit it. That’s where some of the new storage formats shine.

In addition to the DV format, there are camcorders that store the video on mini-DVD (a smaller version of the standard DVD), on a hard disk drive similar to a computer hard drive, and on what is known as SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) flash memory cards which are removable.  The advantage of all three of these formats is that you are simply transferring a file to the computer that has already been written to the DVD, hard drive, or SD card. Therefore transfers take fractions of the time it takes DV footage on tape to be transferred.

The disadvantage of these new storage formats is that you can quickly run out of space to store these digital files. A typical mini-DVD will hold up to an hour’s worth of video which is equivalent to a DV tape, but it is at lower quality. A typical hard drive camcorder might hold 5 hours of high-quality video, or an SDHC memory card may hold an hour or two, but what do you do after that. You can’t buy a new hard drive and insert it into the camcorder, and each SD card costs much more (at this time) than a DV tape does. DV tape does have an “archival” advantage over these other digital storage forms.

Other disadvantages come into play when you go to edit the video. Not all editing programs (especially the free ones) recognize the MPEG2 format from the recordable DVD, or the h.264 (aka AVCHD) codec from the SD cards, so be sure that you think about investing in an editor that can handle these formats.

Finally, don’t forget that many digital still cameras and even cell phones can do video too. However, you can only hold as much video as the storage in the camera or phone allows. Also, the video quality will not be nearly as good as DV or h.264 and it will probably be a slower frame rate.

Is It Time for High Definition?

As we move forward in the digital media era, the question of using the high definition (HD) level of video is one that comes up a lot. It generally has a higher cost in terms of more expensive cameras, and it is more time consuming and expensive to work with in editing. Both of those issues are constantly being reduced and soon “hi-def” will be the norm.

So what is high definition video, what are the benefits, and what are the issues? Well, good if somewhat technical information is available on Wikipedia. Generally it means video, in digital form, that has at least 720 vertical pixels of information. In most cases it also means a wide aspect ratio, so 1280×720 pixels would be common dimensions. Before hi-def came along, TV screens had an aspect ratio of 4:3. The screen was slightly wider than it was tall, but it looked square. Now with HD, the video has an aspect ratio of 16:9 which is more rectangular. There are also two levels of HD video. The 720 vertical pixel video, known as 720p (the “p” stand for progressive scan), and 1080 vertical pixel video, known as 1080p. There is also an interlaced version of the 1080 pixel resolution (1080i), and good information about the differences between progressive scan and interlace is also available at Wikipedia.

The benefits are clearer detail in what you are watching. You essentially have more information packed into a given space. The negative aspect is that HD files are bigger, and therefore take up more storage space. Also, if you were to download an HD video from the Internet it would require more bandwidth, or it would take longer to receive the file. You also need the right display device to watch HD video. Only the relatively new wide-screen digital LCD or plasma screens show you the advantage of HD video. A normal TV won’t show you the added detail.

Again, in the very near future, HD video will be the norm. You will need to decide whether to go with HD video for projects based on your audience. In June 2009, major television stations completely switch their broadcast signals to a digital form. They aren’t required to broadcast in HD, but the older analog TV sets will not work without a cable or satellite box, or converter box. Consult Wikipedia once again on the digital television transition.

For more information, see our article on what to look for in a camcorder.

HD photo by pietel

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Mark Cuban has lots of ideas. His best one was back in the late ’90s when he decided to create a webcasting business that was ultimately sold for millions of dollars to Yahoo! Cuban may well have another great idea to save Internet video, but I’ll leave commenting on his ideas to a possible future post. Mark should know something about HD video. He is the Chairman of HDNet, a cable television network that broadcasts exclusively in high definition (HD).

HDNet is one of the few networks that has original HD programming, and by that I mean an independent network broadcasting exclusively in HD. HDNet’s Dan Rather Reports is an example of original HD programming. Depending on who your cable provider is, you may or may not have HDNet available to you. Without getting into the sordid details about why, you likely will have either HDNet or a network known as Mojo available with your cable or satellite provider, or with fiber-optic systems such as Verizon’s FiOS, or AT&T’s U-verse.

So Mark Cuban started a business and is one of the leaders of a company that produces HD video. It is with that knowledge that makes this statement so confusing:

100pct (sic) of the internet video that you see offered on the net as HD, is not HD. Plain and simple.

He then offers the following definition (of sorts):

What is HD video ? HD Vidoe (sic) is video you can watch on a screen of ANY size and say…”that looks good, almost as good as it can get “.

My purpose here is not to picks nits, but if that is his definition of HD video, then by who’s standard do we define “looks good” and “as good as it can get”? Look, there are lots of sites, services, and networks trying to distribute HD video on the Internet, or at least what they self-define as HD video. I should also point out that high definition video on the web is mostly a buzzword, and Cuban’s definition doesn’t help.

Here, let me define HD video. It is digital video that is represented by the minimum dimensions of 1280×720 pixels (720p). Now was that so hard? You can also take a look at the Wikipedia entry for high definition video for many more details. Having tendered those definitions, it should also be said that like all things digital, there is a quality factor that can affect how good HD video looks.  It is generally represented by what is known as bit rate. It is also something that most directly relates to the fudge factor that gets used on some supposed HD video sites. Again, the details start to get way too complicated in terms of what makes good (and bad) HD video, so let’s just stop before we hurt ourselves.

What makes Cuban so wrong is that there are good, and successful, attempts at providing HD video through the web. The screen grab at the top of this post is from one of these Internet TV networks called Revision3. The show is called Tekzilla, and by every measurement that I know of it is high definition. The basic specs of the video are, 1280×720 pixels (again 720p), h.264 video codec, AAC audio. It’s video quality that I’ve raved about before.

There’s a great way to check out more HD content by using software called Miro. It is similar to iTunes, but geared toward online video, and it provides good quality HD programming. If you check out their Miro Guide, you can check out some of the HD choices. I use it on my home theater PC which is connected to my Pioneer Plasma and it looks good, almost as good as it can get. Oh, sorry. That definition is taken. So what’s with Cuban’s 100% not HD statement? Is it because it’s not Blu-ray quality? Well, it will be a while before we are downloading 20GB files to watch on our HDTVs. Is it because it isn’t the same quality as HDNet? Well, no, Tekzilla probably doesn’t use XDCAM HD (cameras that still sell for over $20,000). However, it looks as good as a lot of the broadcast HD content out there, because it not further compressed by the cable or satellite company. All of this technology (do I have to say it?) is constantly improving. Codecs are being developed that will surpass what we have today that will deliver higher quality at equivalent bit rates. Cuban’s standard sounds like something that we may never achieve, and when it comes down to the basic definition of HD video, he’s wrong.

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