JVC camcorder and Quicktime

you dont say why you want to buy a hard disc recording camcorder, it woould be an interesting and precarious choice.

this camera is a domestic product, it is not a professional quality camera, it would be a good purchase for home use to easily make DVD video's of your family events, without using tape.

the camera is designed to do the following:

record an event onto the hard drive then use the video files to make a DVD video disc so that it can be played on a DVD video player.

it uses video quality recordings exactly the same as DVD video, the hard drive records MPEG2 video which is what DVD video is. normally before making the DVD, DV video from tape has to be compressed and converted to MPEG 2 taking many times longer to encode than to play, this camera does it in real time while recording.


As DVD is a highly compressed format to be used as an end product it is not best suited for further editing

JVC has a technology alliance with Microsoft Windows based software, therefore the software will not work with a Mac. The camera is supplied with DVD authoring software, you will need a recent fast Windows XP based computer to make it run.



I have a professional JVC camera which has the ability to record to an onboard hard drive. I was offered the hard drive at a give away price so the dealer could use me as a test bed. I declined and went for tape to give me the quality and performance I need.

There should be a very good reason to choose a hard drive camera instead of tape to justify such a purpose.

It sounds as if you would be far better buying a mini DV tape based camcorder from JVC, theres lots to choose from.


regards

Gary

Wayne, avoid this camera... it's going to be a cluge to work with I'd think. It shoots MPEG 2 and not even HD... the workflow would be pretty awful... I agree with Gary... buy a DV camera instead... Sony's cameras work extremely well with FCP.

Jerry

I don't think it will be much slower because you still have to do a conversion of this material to edit it in FCP, and the quality of MPEG recordings leaves a lot to be desired. DV would not only be about as fast, but it also could be recorded to a hard drive at the same time if you really needed speed.

It's the quality of the picture that is going to suffer with this camera. Specs are MPEG-2 recordings... it's really not the way to do things at all unless quality doesn't matter. Depending on what you shoot, like any sort of fast motion will have artifact in it because MPEG isn't an "i" frame format. It really only records every 7-15 frames in whole then only records the differences between frames... if there's a lot of movement you'll see uglies...

Jerry

Wayne,

It sounds like what you're looking for is a camcorder that will work with a Firestore (or similar) unit. Essentially, when connected to your camcorder it records the AV signal directly to the Firestore's internal hard drive as well as to the camera tape. When you're finished shooting, connect the Firestore to your computer for file transfer and editing. From what I've heard and read, they are capable of recording DV NTSC quality and resolution in several formats, QuickTime among them (but don't take my word for it).

-DH

I believe the free MPEG Streamclip application is what you need. Here is a download link:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24055

It converts Transport Streams to QuickTime formats.

Good luck.