New camcorder? Yes indeed!! I purchased the $140 Aiptek A-HD. The mic is terrible, there's no hardware buffer (so pans skew) and colors are oversaturated, but it still exceeds my needs. It's small enough that I can carry it in my pocket (which is where it lives), and it's cheap enough that I don't have to be completely paranoid about where I take it and how I handle it. PERFECT!! Since the video is in 720p, I find myself downsampling the footage I take all the time. It's been hard for me so far to wrap my head around the possibility that I would want to record at a lower resolution than I can because I rarely need the ability to pan and zoom around in my shots... then comes the issues involving the editing and rendering of such ridiculously high quality video... bleah!!!
My standard video workflow at this point is:
- Copy the video off the SD card to my secondary computer
- Use SUPER to re-encode the file to an MP4 (from a h.264 AAC-L in a .MOV container) 'cause Sony Vegas 8 doesn't like the A-HD
- Copy the rendered files to my video processing machine
- Apply audio filters
- Audio
- Compress anything above -5 at 40x (the mic peaks a LOT, it's way too sensative)
- Increase the gain on 4KHz+ by 4dB
- Decrease the gain on 500Hz- by 4dB
- Add a soundtrack
- Burn the resources to DVD
Anyhoo, Annabelle is worth it, and the clip I posted today was well worth the price of the camcorder. Life rocks!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment