Use Your 'point-and-shoot' Camera...for video

The recent Geekipedia Supplement to Wired magazine had this to say about camcorders, in the Obsolescence management section on page 38...

Camcorder gadget - “Manufacturers have yet to settle on a hi-def codec or medium. Be patient while they are ironing out the kinks, and stick with a digital point-and-shoot that records video".

For this week's newsletter, I'll try it... put aside my mini-DV tape camcorder with it's firewire connection, and use my Canon PowerShot SD750 7 megapixel camera with its video feature.

I'll connect it with a USB connection and import the files using the beta version of Photo Gallery on my XP laptop.

Before I posted this, I figured I needed at least a little pilot project to see if it worked without the hassle of file conversions. Sure enough, it worked fine...

I started by recording the first things I saw... my laptop's keyboard... some screen clips... then played with making a bluescreen and using it for animated text.

Copying the clips from the camera to the hard drive by USB cable is easy, as is the importing and using of the source files in MM2.1 and MM6.

Here's the one minute test project that puts the clips together. The project was done in MM6.

I hope to spend some time this winter getting to know the new Expression Suite, to enhance the appearance of my website, and to use Silverlight for things beyond simply playing the same videos I have on my site and YouTube.

Thinking of YouTube, my library training sessions for this school year start again on Oct 17th... with the first class about putting movies on YouTube.

I feel obligated to first say why the 'point-and-shoot' isn't as good at taking video as my $1,000+ mini-DV camcorder. After all, it cost so much more... it must be better. Here are some reasons:

the little mic input is on the left side of the camera, not the front, so the audio is what you hear with your left ear.

the smaller sized camera is much lighter in weight, which means the laws of physics say it needs much less force to change its movement. In other words, it's not near as steady as a heavier camcorder when hand-holding.

a 1 GB SD card holds 8 minutes of high quality 640x480 sized video... not the hour of video I can put on a mini-DV tape

the visual quality is less... the audio quality is mono and much less than the stereo from my mini-DV camcorder

its small size makes it such that it fits in your pocket, any pocket, so it can go wherever you do

the visual quality, although less than a mini-DV camcorder, has improved considerably over recent years... and for videos on YouTube and many other online services, anything is good enough or better

you can choose to record and output in NTSC or PAL... my mini-DV camcorder is an NTSC model

this model shoots 7 megapixel still shots, so getting higher quality pictures for stories, and video clips for movies, is easier with one camera than two. It's just a quick flip of the switch on top to toggle between taking video and still pix

it seems to do better in low light than my mini-DV camcorder. I walked around the house at night and, with low level ambient lighting, took video clips... and they looked much better than I expected

The video compression is MJPG (motion JPEG). 640x480 pixels, 30 frames per second.

Note: the camera's manual says QuickTime is needed to play the MJPEG files on a Windows 2000 system.

The clips import, preview and work fine in projects, using MM2.1 on my XP laptop or MM6 on my Vista laptop.

A 46 second clip is 92 MB file. That's 7.2 GB per hour, more than half the size of a DV-AVI file, and larger than high quality DVD MPEG-2 files. You would expect such clips to be pretty good quality. And they are.

Here's a couple full-sized frame snapshots taken by MM2.1 from the video clips. The first is my recent Civil War re-enactment clip on YouTube, playing in an IE7 browser via Veoh TV (which gets YouTube in addition to regular TV stations).

This one is during a slide-show in Photo Gallery.... one of the 7 megapixel snapshots.

The manual has an interesting note about the focus and optical zoom settings remaining fixed at whatever the first frame recorded is... for the rest of the scene.

I was curious about how well a bluescreen clip would work in a movie project if the screen was the LCD of the laptop and the blueness was the background color in a graphics app.

I tried it with RendersoftVRLM, placing an animated URL over the blueness and shooting it such that the bluescreen was zoomed into. The result is the animated URL that plays in the sample clip.

I put the project together in MM6 on my Vista Home Basic laptop, and used one of Rehan's bluescreen transitions. It was easy and pretty effective.

At the end of the week using the SureShot SD750, I'd grown to appreciate it more, but I'm not tempted to use it as a regular replacement for my mini-DV camcorder... or as a replacement for our pro-sumer Sony and Nikon 7 and 10 megapixel cameras.

If you haven't taken any video clips with your 'point-and-shoot' camera, try it.

I'll close with a copy of glow's, a regular on the windowsmoviemakers.net forum, in response to my post announcing this week's subject... he sums up well the value of a 'point-and-shoot' camera.

With a point-and-click camera with a video feature, you can enjoy the events you're recording, and like glow did, more easily get the memories to friends and family.

I look forward to comments and discussion about this and other newsletters on the forums at: 00a901c807d1$1d2c4920$6501a8c0@Hummer

I'm involved in anything and everything that supports the users of Movie Maker and Photo Story, and adding more regularly. Some are free and others reasonably priced.

I'm cutting out the listing at the bottom of reach newsletter, replacing it with this link to my website's page about...

About John 'PapaJohn' Buechler from Microsoft.com

John "PapaJohn" Buechler, of Kalamazoo, Mich., goes by PapaJohn online. An avid user of Movie Maker since its first release, and a regular supporter of the community of Movie Maker users, John received a 2003 MVP award from Microsoft for that support. In March 2003, he started a comprehensive website about Movie Maker 2 at www.PapaJohn.org. He maintains the website, writes books and articles, teaches, and provides support services - all for the community of Movie Maker 2 users. An engineer by formal education, John is a computer database and multimedia expert by business and personal experience. He co-authored the first book about Movie Maker 2 and is actively working on a second one. You can find his advice in the Windows XP Movie Maker newsgroup and in the Windows Movie Makers Forums.

This newsletter is republished with permission of John "PapaJohn" Buechler.
Please note that this is an archive of newsletters and some information may become outdated. PapaJohn, and the webmaster of this site, provides this information "AS IS" with no warranties.

Visit - PapaJohn's Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 2 Newsletter Index

[Lights, Camera, Movie Maker]

Windows Movie Maker tips, tutorials, forums and more...

Use Your 'point-and-shoot' Camera... for video