[Kdenlive-devel] Buyin an HDV camcorder - Advice needed

[Brett Owen]

I bought a Sony HDR-HC3 about 3 months ago at Circuit City. It's good camera, 
for only having 1 ccd, and costing $1500. It supports zebra lines also, which 
was kind of a surprise at that price. The only thing I should warn you of, is 
that although the camera claims 'Full 1080i', it's really only 1080x1440. So 
it records anamorphic widescreen, rather than the full square pixel 1080x1920 
widescreen. None the less, for the price, it's still much better picture 
quality than a standard definition DV camera. 

I wouldn't get your hopes up too far though on low-light. It has the same 
trouble as any 1 ccd camera there.

Also, though I don't know much about it. I read some where that Canon is 
coming out with a full 1080x1920 res camera for only $1300 in a bit. So, that 
might be something to hold out for. It might actually look worse though, 
given that it has to fit those extra pixels into the same 25mbps bitrate (if 
it uses MiniDV tapes?). 

Also, check out the article on HDV at wikipedia. It has some good advice of 
the pluses and minuses regarding that format. Of course, the plus is that 
it's much cheaper for the moment.

Also #2, Kdenlive DOES open hdv mpeg2 files, but it doesn't compensate for the 
1-2 second delay between key frames. So it's kind of useless for that, unless 
you convert the mpeg2 file to some other format before editing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV

-Brett