On Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:56:42 -0500, Geoff Schultz
wrote:

Wayne.B wrote in
:

I'm thinking about buying a HiDef video camera, primarily for use on
the boat.

Does anyone have any recommendations or cautionary advice?

Before you jump into the HD realm of video, please look at the demands that
it places on the system that you're going to use to edit it. HD requires a
huge amount of processing power (and memory) to do it well. The vast
majority of Windows based applications/systems can't do real-time editing
of HD video. You almost always have to generate a "proxy" version (low
res) version of the video to do the editing and then generate the HD output
based upon edits to the proxy version.

Then, if you're going to view the HD output on anything other than your
computer, you'll have to get a BluRay burner, which is expensive and the
media is very expensive relative to DVDs.

All in all, if you've never edited HD video before, I'd be very careful in
wishing for a HD video camera and associated systems to process it. The
camera will just be a small portion of what you'll have to spend to process
and view the output in HD.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org

Good points Geoff. I have no experience editing video at all so I'm
sure there will be some climbing of the learning curve and surprises
along the way. I recently acquired a quad core desktop with a BluRay
DVD burner, 4 GB of memory and 64 bit Vista. Hopefully that will
give me enough power to get started. Most of my viewing will be on a
HD television or large monitor.