martinjy.com — Martin Young’s blog

Experimenting with video devices

The other day I wrote briefly about the tiny Flip Video cameras. I’ve since discovered that whilst you can’t buy them in Australia at the moment, they might be here soon.

I’m attracted to the idea of the thing, but in my other blog post I wondered whether I needed one, given that I already own a 7mp digital still camera that has video capability. (I also own a cheap-ish Sony MiniDV camcorder, so three video devices seems a bit unnecessary).

I had a spare 20 minutes this afternoon, so I thought I’d shoot a quick video with both my current devices (at the same time), upload the vids to the web and compare the quality, speed of upload, filesize etc.

First, the video taken by my still camera (a Pentax Optio W20)

It took me 2 minutes to transfer the 90-second, 100mb .mov file to my MacBook via USB, 3 minutes to import it into iMovie, 30 seconds to crop it to 30 seconds long, 2 minutes to export it to .mp4 format at 640 x 480 (that’s native), and 2 minutes to upload the 4mb file to Revver over my relatively slow internet connection.

(the video’s not live on revver yet … so here’s a screenshot of it playing in Quicktime)

Second, the video camera (Sony DCR-HC26 mini DV)

3 minutes to transfer 90 seconds of video directly into iMovie via FireWire, 30 seconds to crop it to 30 seconds, 5 minutes to export it to .mov at 640 x 480, and 14 minutes to upload the 30mb file to Revver.

Ignoring the highly boring subject matter(!)…..

• even though the the vision on the HC26 is noisy (light was poor), it’s way better than the W20,
• sound is almost non-existent on the W20, but the hiss on the HC26 is pretty loud,
• getting the footage off the HC26 into iMovie was simpler than from the W20,
• the final file size of the HC26 video is almost 8 times larger than the W20, which makes for slow exports and slow upload times, plus more bandwidth when downloading/watching.

I hate videos with crap sound, so despite the long upload time I think the HC26 wins this round, but it’d be really interesting to see how the footage quality of a Flip stacks up against these two, and how quickly a Flip’d let me get footage live on the web.

Maybe there’s a sweet spot between the still camera’s file size and the video camera’s quality.