video cameras

[Aidan Wilson]

A good setup is to take with you a small recorder, probably a Zoom H4n, a 
good mic, a Rode NT4 are still the best around, in my opinion, a long 
cable, and a hard drive video camera like a Canon Legria HF20, 21, etc.,

The files are massive when you first transfer them, but if you have a big 
enough hard drive, this shouldn't be a big problem. Oddly, iMovie is the 
best program for transferring, except it removes certain metadata - use it 
for transfer only and then operate on the output .mov files; the reason 
being that the .mts files (AVCHD format) are utterly impossible to work 
with natively.

When recording video, either use only the video camera and plug the 
microphone into it (trusting whichever compressed audio format they use in 
AVCHD format), or, better, but requiring more tech savviness, record the 
audio separately wth your specific audio device and place the video camera 
some way away. When doing so, do something at the start of the recording 
so you can accuratlely time-align the good audio with the video. Something 
as simple as a couple of claps close to the mic and visible to the 
camera should do it.

The video files that these Canon cameras produce are simply fantastic. 
Just avoid Sony at all costs; they have an overwhelming culture of 
proprietary formats, both in terms of hardware and software.

-Aidan Wilson
Paradisec

-- 
Aidan Wilson

The University of Sydney
+612 9036 9558
+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at usyd.edu.au

On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Felicity Meakins wrote:

> I haven’t been overly impressed with the quality of the hard drive cameras
> I’ve looked at. I have a Canon HV30 Black Progressive HDV which rates better
> than the Sony equivalent. The HDDV quality is infinitely better than the
> normal DV cameras and better than any of the hard drive cameras I’ve used.
> The digitised files require more hard drive space, but it is worth it for
> the image.
> 
> I think that as linguists doing documentation we spend more time worrying
> about sound quality and good sound equipment and not enough about the
> quality of footage. We think of it as just adding a bit of context to our
> recordings rather than considering them as the primary recording that
> language communities are going to be interested in in decades to come.
> 
> 
> On 26/3/10 6:57 AM, "Laura Robinson" <lcrobinson1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>       Hello all,
>
>       I am looking to buy some video cameras for my fieldwork this
>       summer.  I'm thinking to get a couple of the new tiny video
>       cameras, plus something more mid-range, like a solid-state video
>       recorder.  It would be nice to get away from miniDV if possible,
>       and I was wondering what this list thought of the various kinds
>       of new video cameras on the market? 
>
>       Thanks,
>       Laura
>       --
>       Laura C. Robinson
>       Postdoctoral Researcher
>       Department of Linguistics
>       University of Alaska, Fairbanks
>       http://go.alaska.edu/lcrobinson
> 
> 
> 
>