Very Veronica said:
I'm trying to decide what kind of camcorder to buy. I'll be using it primarily to take vid clips of me & my special friends to upload on my eventual paid adult site.
Question is, do i need 3CCD technology or should i go for a cheaper $500 or under cam. A friend tells me that when the vid's get compressed on the site, you lose that superior resolution. True?
These are the 2 models that i'm thinking about now...the gs300 has optical stabilization as opposed to electronic which i think is a total bonus when you're having to navigate those twister-like group sessions...
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Panasonic-PV-GS150-First-Impressions-Camcorder-Review.htm
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Panasonic-PV-GS300-Camcorder-Review.htm
When buying the camcoder, the most important thing to do is video something in the store. Then look at the video with the sound cranked right up.
Most Sony camcoders pickup the sound of the various spindles (tape, CD, DVD, HD) and record it along with your video. It's impossible to get rid of this sound without destroying the video.
The dirty little secret of all electronics like camcoders, TVs, CDs, DVDs, etc. is that they are all exactly the same thing packed into different looking plastic housings.
That's why you have to actually video something with each camcoder you are looking at and listen to it.
We would all hate watching a VV video with a high pitched scream or continuous rumble in the background ;-)
The mistake many people make when recording something for future broadcast is that they record at high resolution when they know they are broadcasting at a much lower resolution.
If you know that you are recording for a web page and you know that the bandwidth you have available will only support x hours at x resolution, it doesn't make sense to be recording at xxx resolution. A standard TV picture is 720 X 480. You can display video at 320 X 180 on a TV without noticeable quality issues.
If you want to run a video in a box on a standard 17 inch desktop monitor, you are looking for a resolution of about 640 X 480. (assumes the desktop resolution is 1024 X 780)
You will find it takes a lot of bandwidth to run 10 instances of 640 X 480 video at the same time. (We are assuming that many men like looking at you babe ;-,)
Getting video into a Computer can be as simple as hooking up a firewire cable between the camcoder and computer. The actuall physical connection is not going to be the most important part.
The big problem is syncing your video and audio. Many input cards use a chipset that seperates the video and audio streams and then it becomes a problem of rejoining the streams in the digital world so that all of the ahhs, moans and slippery noises match what is on the screen.
I like the ATI All in Wonder cards, but don't use the broken software that ATI provides. Get a copy of ULead's Moviemaker, a good burning program and a good authoring program.
Almost forgot to talk about light. You can get good light for your video with a whole array of lights. Of course, I'm not sure that I would pay for a VV video with everyone wearing Sunglasses and SPF 50 sunscreen. Or, you can get a video camcoder that has good low-light capabilities.
We've all seen the videos that were taken at room lighting with a camcoder that doesn't have low-light capabilties and we've all seen the videos that were taken in what could double as a tanning booth.
