[olug] DVD Camcorder and Linux

[Daniel Linder]

On Sun, March 26, 2006 13:42, Robert Alan Jacobs wrote:

>> I have a 5 year old Sony Handycam that uses "Digital8"
tapes and

>> it works well.  The taped are about $8 each and hold about
30-45

>> minutes.  It has a firewire port (Sony calls it iLink I think)
and I

>> have used it with both Windows XP and Linux and it works well.

>>

> 

> No firewire port here; contributes to why I find it important to be
able

> to pull the video off the camera, edit it if I choose to on my
system,

> and then burn it to DVD for distribution.



The good thing is that an add-in FireWire pot was only $25-30 at DIT five
years ago -- probably dropped since then.  I think I have also seen
some cameras with a USB 2.0 port (~480Mbit/sec) so that might be another
option now.



>> If I were in the market today I'd look at the camcorders that
write

>> directly to the 3" DVDs.  I don't trust tapes over a few
years

>> and at least the DVD would be readable by a computer if/when the
camera

>> dies.

> 

> Yeah.  I'm not really interested in tapes at all (for these reasons)
-

> though the reviews I've read seem to indicate that the picture
quality

> you get from tape is much better than what you get going to mini
DVDs.



The quality of the image should depend entirely on the CCD in the camera
(and to a lesser part, the firmware doing the MPEG video/audio
compression).  If the CCD is high resolution and the lens is of good
quality, the medium it's saving to won't matter any -- a "bit"
on a digital tape or DVD is the same value of "1" or
"0" nomatter how you read it. :)



Bringing this back to a Linux question... :)  Has anyone played with
Cinerella or other digital video editing software under Linux in a
while?  When I played with it 2-3 years ago it was stable but slow
and quite complex to start out on.  The Microsoft "Movie
Maker" software was just about opposite: easy to get started,
reasonably fast at editing, but I had to save about every five minutes or
it would die a horrible death.  Are there any other options out there
for us weekend movie producers?





Dan



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