A New Videocamera

Last week we bought the Panasonic HDC-SD5, a Full High-Definition camera. That’s a resolution of 1920×1080! It doesn’t even fit on my screen :P It can be connected directly to TV using the HDMI cable or a normal coax AV-cable. Of course HDMI is the preferred way :-). The camera is really easy to use, it only has the most essential buttons. The “more” advanced features are available using a thumb-joystick which navigates through some fancy on-screen menu. This works very well. The camera stores its data on a SDHC-card. It came with a 4GB card, which makes it possible to shoot a 40 minute movie on the highest quality. So its 1GB for every 10 mins. Seems to be doable, but I will probably buy a 8GB card in the near future. On holidays I can just bring my laptop and store everything on there using the USB-cable.

The first time I connected the camera to my iMac, iMovie automatically recognized the camera and started importing. No need to install drivers or additional software, pretty cool. However it seems iMovie is converting the movie to a some (almost) loss-less format, so my 2 minute test movie was already near the 1GB. I solved this by just copying the video file stored on the camera (which is by the way a H.264 codec) and storing it as a disk image on my computer. There is no player which seems to play this file as it is a cutting edge format. Lucky iMovie does have the import functionality for this format though, only it is not possible to play this codec in realtime. That explains the conversion at importing time.

Anyway, it’s all working very well. I uploaded a test movie to Youtube which (of course) decreased the quality greatly. I’ll upload an HD-quality version soon.

Ow and btw, did I mention the camera is extremely small and lightweight and that it got a cool Leica lense?