sgrom

Forget the zombies - I'm more worried about the shark! And yes, that was truly bizzare. I wonder how it was made.

This may get a lot of posts in the future, but I'm curious and so I'll step up and ask the newbie questions. I'm thinking of what camcorder to get, and the Sony's recent release of new new HDV and AVCHD consumer camcorders has got me thinking. What are your thoughts on AVCHD versus HDV? HDV apparently only offers one play time, 60 minutes, whereas AVCHD offers LP, SP, HQ and HQ+. Using a dual layer disk, HQ+ will last you about 25 minutes and LP 60.. My key questions are: - will the video quality of AVCHD in LP mode be as good as HDV? - Is HQ+'s video quality significantly better than HDV's? - How many minutes of footage to you shoot on a typical [say, 45 minute] dive? My main qualm about HQ+ is that essentially you're forced to spend half of your dive not shooting. Woe be to you if that whale shark does nothing much for 25 minutes, and then does something spectacular at minute 25.5. Thanks for your thoughts!

All- Thanks for the suggestions. Yep, the software I guess will need to drive the hardware. That leads me to which software suite suits my needs and a whole different can of worms. But, I will budget a decent GPU into the hardware equation as well. Thanks again, MarkosC

Hello All- I just got a new computer that I eventually hope to do some video editing on. For now, I'll probably do some SD from a consumer camcorder, but I'm also thinking eventually of moving to an HD consumer camcorder, or maybe even one of the cheaper "prosumer" models. My question is, does the video card you use make any difference in the speed in which your system processes your footage? (my guess would be yes) What's the main determinant of performance, i.e. will an older card good be enough for HD, or will newer gaming cards with lots of memory and new technology make a substantial difference in performance? Put more concretely, if I want to edit the video from my HDR-HC3 on my machine (Athlon XP 4200 with 2 GB of RAM), will I notice thay my computer's performance is significantly faster if use two ATI X1950s with 512MB of memory versus just one ATI Radeon 9600 with 128MB of memory? [i'm using these only as examples; I'm not set on Sony or ATI, and I know that an AGP card isn't gonna work optimally in a PCI express slot. Oh, and any video card recommendations you may have are of course welcome] Thanks! Markos