AVCHD & Sony HDR-SR1
Another one of my interests is Digital Photography. Besides a Nikon D70, which I absolutely love, the fam and I were planning a trip to the land of the long white cloud..aka New Zealand. So I thought I would go look on Ebay to see if there was a video camera that could complement my camera. I been to the shops and had my mind set on a Sony HDR-SR1 but they were a bit beyond my budget.
What is an Sony HDR-SR1? it is a true 1080i HDV camcorder..for those not in the know, it is the same resolution as some of the lcds and plasmas around. It also has a built in hard disc of 30GB which means it doesnt need any tapes at all. It also touts a new digital format called AVCHD which is a highly compressed form of mpeg 4. More about this later.
Went to Ebay to see if i could pick up one.
Yes...HDR-SR1 were available and one caught my eye..HDR-SR1 model with extras..mmm ok. it was an NTSC model, ok I could live with that..I mean most tvs now can support both NTSC and PAL so i thought not an issue. Let the buyer beware, there is actually two types of electronic devices sold in Japan. One for the local market and the other for the export market. And guess which sucker bought which model? Yep...I got the the local version. Got conned by the buyer who said you could change the menus. Actually there was a recourse to this, you should be able to put at least a negative feedback against the sellers name for false advertising. But alas i gave feedback before i found out that there was no english menus!!!!! what a dingbat! So I am stuck with a high performance camera in Japanese! lol
That aside we recently had a conference and i had to get a new external hard disk to store the raw footage for the meetings. Works about about 3 hours of taping is about 20GB in size!
I evaluated a few editiing packages..Sony Vegas, Ulead DVD Studio and i found that the best and easiest one to use was the Pinnacle Studio Plus 11. It will do AVCHD format and comes with a number of templates. You can upgrade to the Ultimate version but you have to pay Pinancle for every extra feature you want to use or unlock..can turn out to be an expensive option.