Apologies for the lateness of this post good Hydrapinionists. My only defence is being on an overseas trip, my Internet connection was less than flaky despite numerous attempts and time zone differences and a tight itinerary also interfered.

Which leads me very neatly to the reason for the trip, and that was a launching of a swag of new cameras and camcorders from Panasonic among the delights of Queenstown in New Zealand. To test these cameras, we were dropped on top of mountains by helicopter, next to cobalt blue and freezing cold lakes, endured pounding and saturation by jetboat, wondered at the skills of Gus and Bob the sheepdogs, gazed down on the town from a very steep cable car, and were wined and dined on the best fare NZ has to offer. And that was day one! We also were taken to Lord of the Rings filming sites, wine tastings, gold panning and of course treated to a genuine Haka.

All jolly nice of course, but at the end of the day, it was about the launch of a bunch of new digital still, waterproof and video cameras. Were they any good and did they display any trends for the future?

There were far more individual models than can be discussed here; for the three days we each were given a standard DSC (digital still camera), a waterproof still and a basic HD SD card based camcorder. The DSC was best utilised to capture the panoramas of the countryside, especially mountain and lake shots, the waterproof (and dust and shock proof) were brilliant in the spray and wash of the jetboats along with four wheel driving in rivers and the odd lake splash and the camcorders shone in the vistas of the mountains while zipping above them at 6000 feet or so by chopper.

A test was that no manuals were available so it was very much learn on the fly – pardon the pun - or trust the Intelligent Auto. A few high speed shots failed in my case, but that was by being too clever rather than a camera failure, but colour saturation especially seemed to me to be excellent as was auto focus and auto scene detection.

Trends? Yes a major one. All of the new models have inbuilt hi-def capability and this is surely a pointer to the future
In truth, if these days you don’t have high def capability in anything able to take video, you’d have to be mad. If Nokia can do it in a phone (true 1280 * 1080) and have an HDMI port, the bigger form factor of a camera should be a doddle. But PLEASE manufacturers, can you include an HDMI cable in the box (and an SD card).

Will this hasten the death of the camcorder? Not a chance in my opinion as the ergonomics of a DSC are not conducive to long periods of filming and audio is always an issue.

Prices are also dropping in a features v price; whether people will actually USE these features is another point, but one would hope so. The satisfaction of a GOOD photo brings a warm inner glow it has to be said and you need to be familiar with the feature set to get the very best.

There was one flaw that to me was glaring, and this may be because I do have a SCUBA diving certificate. The waterproof cameras are good for 12 metres depth and they do have a wrist strap, but from experience, in water these can be a hindrance. So what happens when you drop the camera in 14 metres of water? They don’t float you know, so whilst unlike many manufacturers who don’t paint their waterproofs bright colours so they can be seen when they are dropped, Panasonic have some lurid colours, I would suggest also adding a small flotation device as used by boaties who have such a device on their keys.

For more information on the new camcorders/cameras, see www.panasonic.com.au. And for a brilliant holiday, get yourself to Queenstown in NZ!

(Reviews coming soon to my website at www.auscamonline.com)

I am currently conducting a survey of videocamera users and amateur / prosumer film makers (see http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5FPPTSK and feel free to contribute)

Some interesting trends are appearing. By far the biggest is the swing to using dSLR cameras to shoot video, and I know from my investigations that many vendors are angling their marketing to take advantage of this trend.

Also of interest has been the reaction to a question regarding a preference for getting information from a web site as against a paper based magazine. Magazine winds hands down. 95% in fact.

But what I was interested in was the % of people who would buy local as against from overseas suppliers or the internet, considering the recent diatribe from Gerry Harvey and his ilk. My survey shows that around 10% will buy from overseas, BUT, bearing in my mind that my market is 80% beginners, second camcorder buyes and prosumers (weddings, documentaries and the like) most have said they buy from specialist video shops.

Videocraft, Videopro and Videoguys are at the top of the pile.

So getting proper advice is important, not necessarily price it seems.

What are your thoughts on this? Tell me via an email to david@auscamonline.com or as mentioned earlier, fill in the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5FPPTSK

Oh and the magazine website is www.auscamonline.com.

Over the last few weeks, time off for the Festive season and Australia Day besides, I have been privy to a number of launches by the major camcorder manufacturers – and some from the not so major. At the recent CES show in Las Vegas, more than 100 new cameras were released of both the DSC (digital still camera) and camcorder type. Let alone new flavour of the month, dSLRs. To keep abreast of these as non-disclosure agreements expire, pop over to www.auscamonline.com.

New players in the game include BenQ, Toshiba plus a resurgent Samsung, and a swathe of new models and technologies from the old favourites of Sony, Canon, Panasonic and JVC (with a 3D model).

And of course the DSC only manufacturers are ramping up their offerings with higher resolutions, better low light capability, extra functions and usability. And let’s not even go near phones – although I have to say the stills and hi-def full HD video from my Nokia N8 is simply breathtaking.

The future for the video maker never looked brighter.

But just for a moment, let me reign in the clippety clops. Over the Festive period, in my laundry-come-storeroom I had a water pipe let go and neatly deposit a few hundred of litres of water, perfectly aimed, into a set of those white polythene boxes you can buy from the $2 stores to store stuff in - in this case, all my older video and electronic gear including my first video camera, a Canon 8mm wonder complete with colour viewfinder that cost me over $1500 15 years ago, a bucket load of controllers, wireless devices, modems – you get the idea. But the camcorder was my main cry-on-a-shoulder over.

I still have a bunch of 8mm tapes (all copied to hard drive thankfully), but no later than a week afterwards, one of my senior writers on Auscam Online, Ben “Biggles” Longden had an urgent need, , for an 8mm camcorder to get some footage off for a client. He knew I had one, and asked to borrow it. It was with a heavy heart I had to break the news.

Le 8mm Canon est mort

Morale of the story? Although the camera is dead, the footage is safe. If I hadn’t captured it all to hard disk, then this stuff may have never seen the light of day ever again. Sure, there are copying houses, but as the formats get older, the costs rise, perhaps to the point where you think it isn’t worth it.

I say what price memories of the past that can never be reconstructed?

We are now in the age of the SD card and to a lesser degree, the in-camera HDD. It doesn’t take much to do a dump to an external hard disk. Memory these days is cheap.

So do it! Now!

Oh and if anyone has a tape based DV camera that is sitting doing nothing and the Firewire port works, let me know. That was another casualty. And I have LOTS of DV tapes to get to hard disk.

Contact me at david@auscamonline.com or vbthedog@gmail.com. Ta!

I saw some new camcorders last week. Now I am not allowed to say whose or any details whatsoever as I am under a non-disclosure agreement that says they will hold Budweiser the Dog to ransom if I do, but it got me to thinking. It can happen you know.

Professionals will tell you that with any shot – be it video or still – the original should stay pristine and edits etc only done on a copy. So why do manufacturers continue to add “artistic effects” to their menus allow users to happily alter things in the original as they go? The majority of these look ghastly after the fact and more often than not, the user feels remorse about doing it as the original is now gone for good.

I suppose doing it to a family snap down the beach is not too much of an issue, but there are certain occasions where it is Just Not Done. I had a friend of a friend ask me once if I could “fix” her wedding video”. Seems Auntie Ethel (or it may have been Uncle Bill) had tried out every effects setting possible during the shooting.

I declined in the same way as someone who wanted theirs shot in 3D. I ran away and hid.

If you really must have something sepia toned or otherwise hideously altered, get a copy of Photoshop Elements, a Corel Draw Suite or some such thing and learn the basics. After all, “fixing in post” is half the fun of the creativity!

A recent calamity taught me a valuable lesson. For safety sake I have always captured all my tapes from the Canon XHA1 to a 1TB Seagate hard disk in my desktop computer. I then file the tapes away, labelled and never to be used again.

This drive is a secondary drive in an XP based computer (no other reason than laziness and one day it’ll be Windows 7), and recently the main drive decided to pop its clogs. This has led to a dilemma as in the process, something seems to have happened to the secondary drive.

The primary was an IDE drive and this is a SATA. It seems that to the older MoBo in the desktop, the SATA drive is somehow kidded into thinking it was an IDE – technology I am not overly confident with at all. No further, I know nothing at all about this stuff.

So what I have is a drive with 500GB of unedited video on it, and seemingly, no way to access it. The drive is perfectly OK, so a format will bring it back to life, but that 500GB is data is around 60 hours+ of video by a quick non-scientific calculation.
I have a few more things to try, but this is a great advertisement for tape. Cheap. Storable. And importantly, can be recaptured. A pain, a lot of time, but it is still there .

I wonder in the current model line ups of the main manufacturers, how many SD cards and hard disks are written and overwritten time and time again, meaning that any loss off a hard disk is most likely going to be permanent.

Would you risk that? Not me. Tape all the way.