"Geoff Schultz" wrote in message
.. .
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.



I'll have to go look it up but somewhere I read that a regular DVD burner
like that installed in my laptop can burn high def onto a regular DVD-R and
it will play in a Playstation 3 as a Blu-Ray. Don't jump on me yet .... I
have to go find where I read that and how you do it. I specifically recall
the instructions said that Blu-Ray media is not required however the DVD-R
media will not store as much video.

BTW ... I have no problems editing the HD format (1080/30P) on my laptop
using Roxio. It takes a while to process, but works fine. My laptop is
an HP Pavilion, Vista 64-bit, 4Gb Ram. I haven't done a really long video
yet, but what I've done work fine.

Eisboch

Eisboch