Looking at purchasing a Full HD waterproof video camera with good optical zoom and was wondering what anyone out there has tried and their opinions??
What would you recommend?

G'day Toby,

Jr Walks is right. I've got my self a Sony HDR-XR520 with the sports pack SPK-HCE which can give me up to 5m depths of HD recording. You don't have to get the higher end camera like this one but its the housing sports pack thats brilliant. Down side is the housing is clear and lets in light which drowns out the LCD screen (you have a little mirror which allows you to see the LCD screen) and makes it hard to see if your trying to zoom in on stuff, especially since we have kiting in mind and when its sunny, things are not perfect. But the other side to that is because its HD, when you edit the footage, you can post zoom (editing program allows you to zoom footage) and the quality is still mostly there, so you don't have to zoom so much while filming and therefore just 'aim' the camera and record, don't even bother too much with zoom. By the way this camera is 12 times optical, you can fit a 2 times adaptor with a small modification (a small repositioning of the camera inside the water housing to pull its position back and then you can fit a 2x or even wide angle lens).

Also, this camera has brilliant steady shot features which makes it perfect for in water filming of kiting while in the surf. I've checked out other brands and this sony model is the best I've see so far.

One last thing, working is full HD is hard on you computer, you need a fast powerful computer to handle the extra info, my software and computer was fine on my older Standard Definition stuff, but ****s it self now on HD .

cheers,

Robert.

I know its not a proper video camera, but the compact Panasonic Lumix FT1 that they have just put out is waterproof and does HD video recording. (Only AVHD lite I think) But the reviews on it's picture quality are pretty postive. Most tough cameras seem to have crap picture quality and this might be a good compromise (Not to mention a hell of a lot cheaper) I am looking to pick one up myself as I always seem to break my cameras by dropping them or landing on them while snowboarding.

Puetz your camera sound really nice........

I've been sort of looking around but don't have enough cash yet. I think although HD is expensive and not really used that much yet, its worth the investment. With in a year blue ray players will be taking over dvd players and HD will become standard. All broadcast is now HD, meaning all of your SD footage will become less attractive. Even if you don't use HD yet its good to have to footage archived in that format cause you will.

puetz - is your camera minidv?

I recorded 7 hours of HD 1440 x 1080 kiteboarding while on Cocos last year on my Sony HD9 in a Sony sports pack. Made an incredibly sharp video on BluRay disk.

Rob

I bought a panasonic Lumix DMC-FT1 digital camera. It does the job that I wanted. A 43sec lite HD movie was 80meg. It is a compact snappy happy digi camera, but takes good pics - generally 6meg each on its best settings.

Couple of times taking surf vids the data overloaded the memory and it shut down. 9 out of 10 times it was no probs.

Poida said...

I bought a panasonic Lumix DMC-FT1 digital camera. It does the job that I wanted. A 43sec lite HD movie was 80meg. It is a compact snappy happy digi camera, but takes good pics - generally 6meg each on its best settings.

Couple of times taking surf vids the data overloaded the memory and it shut down. 9 out of 10 times it was no probs.

Poida, that's what I am looking at getting, so you are happy with it? How much did you manage to pick it up for? Sounds like JB duty free will be getting a visit.

I'm with Reflex on this one.
high compression "HD" recording is a compromise. The h.264 codec was basically developed for the plethora of security camera recording systems out on the market to extend recording time and still give decent quality to the recorded images to be able to define faces/numberplates etc.
Even basic DV tape recorders will chew up over 12Gb to record 1 hour of video, but this does give you much better colour and contrast to your footage.
Also, I prefer tape. I know you don't get 9+ hours of recording, but you also don't loose 9+ hours of recording in 1 hit. Tape is direct. The tape contacts the recording head and is held in place. Unless the camera suffers a HUGE impact it will keep recording. If (heaven forbid), water enters the unit, then what you have on tape will probably be salvageable.
Laptop Hard Drives are used in HDD cameras. These drives are slow (4500/5400 rpm compared to 7500-10000 rpm for bigger drives) hence the requirement for compression of the recorded video as they simply cannot keep up the data write rate. "solid state" memory is used to cache the video when it cannot be written to the HDD quick enough. These drives are also fragile. When the power is off, the little arm that writes data to the "platters" (little magnetic round things that store the data) on the drive is parked away and impacts are not so much or an issue. The problem comes when impacts occur when the little arm is out writing data to the platters and this causes a write to the wrong area. This can cause data corruption and ruin your video. over time this will also degrade the efficiency of the HDD and slow down it's recording rate. It can also scratch the surface of the platter rendering it useless. As for water ingress, if it gets wet, its pretty much all over. Putting the drive in a laptop or hard drive caddy usually does not work as most companies use proprietary disk formats that are unreadable by most operating systems without the camera's interface.
I'm a bit of a gumby with editing and it takes me about 6-7 hours to edit 1-2 hours of footage down to 3-5 mins. 9 hours worth, you do the sums.
Hope all this helps

pretty sure sanyo do a hd waterproof mod.
i have the non and it is the best quality camera i have ever owned. plus it was under 1g.

Reflex Films said...



The h.264 codec is brilliant - for final delivery - ie the final compression once the edit is done - but its ABSOLUTELY hideous for use as a souce codec to edit on the timeline because the computer has to work SUPEr hard to decompress the codec. It will hang up, take hours to render and generally be a pain in the ass on anything other than a supercomputer.

If i was starting out i would Go with Standard def - off tape - which edits like butter on the timeline - even on an older computer -and focus on getting good light.

My old Sony Hc3 does a great job recording HDV but i ALWAYS transcode it to something else because HDV is a nightmare to edit too.

What computer setup do you use please?

You can cut on laptops - but just not the basic ones..
An apple Mac pro laptop will eat up editing in the field and even in a studio - but these Grunty babies arent cheap. Lots of indies and pros work on the run with these machines.

I cut on either:

an Apple 13 inch laptop - perfect for basic cuts in the field and capture / Hard drive shot management on shoot.

or

my Apple G5 power Mac tower with 8gb Ram - i have about 4tb of disk space right now. And i need more!

despite this older technology i can still work work quickly as i am mostly working with DVCPROHD from P2 cards on a Panasonic HVX 202

or Apple intermediate (a bit slower to edit and render) for all transcoded HDV material-

these codecs are nearly as easy for a computer to work with on the timeline as SD DV.

If i was shooting in AVCHD or HDV and wanting to edit natively in those formats i would be stuffed. And up for a quick 5g of new MacPro tower power. Basically any mpeg / h.264 / formats are a NIGHTMARE to work with - unless you have a blazing hardware set up.

Its the dirty little secret that no one tells consumers - especially as DV tape cams become harder to find as all the "Wonderful" (not) new flash card, HArd drive only cams are dominating the market now.

Editing is a very trial and error process to get the right look and timing so render speed on the timeline is a crucial aspect.

As is screen real estate - get the biggest monitor screen you can afford.

Reflex Films said...

.......If i was shooting in AVCHD or HDV and wanting to edit natively in those formats i would be stuffed. And up for a quick 5g of new MacPro tower power. Basically any mpeg / h.264 / formats are a NIGHTMARE to work with - unless you have a blazing hardware set up.

Its the dirty little secret that no one tells consumers .........

Reflex,
is there any easy way to sort the editing of the AVCHD lite output???
the render time was not impressive
other than buying a $5K second hand Panasonic HVX 202?

Once again, the Sony Handycam HDR-SR11E records in compressed format.
7 hours of video on a 60Gb hard drive says it all. It's a compressed format, so you loose alot of detail in every frame. Not true native HD

For more info on AVCHD, check this.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD

From the sony website, you can see this camera does not even get close to 25 MB/sec. The best it can do is 16Mb/sec

Movie Quality (Average Bit Rate/VBR)
HD: AVC HD 16M (FH) / AVC HD 9M (HQ) /
AVC HD 7M (SP) / AVC HD 5M(LP)
SD: 9M (HQ) / 6M (SP) / 3M (LP)

Nasty HDD/memory stick storage as well.

i say go a SD DV tape cam - those panasonic gs 250 small 1'4 inch 3 chip series ones are great

and can be had super cheap now - probably less than 1 g.

And will edit like butter on even an ageing computer.

Or go HDv and transcode - My 3 year old Sony HC3 with housing works nicely- but you have to transcode - i go to apple int codec or pro res. And it has awesome telemacro..

try going across to DV or DVCpro - those are undemanding codecs for the computer to edit - but the file sizes will increase.

cheers

agree with the above
have panasonic 3ccd 250s which takes crisp clear image to DV tape
but also a wterproof panasonic that records to sd card (MPEG)
premier struggled with this (MPEG4) once the dvd got greater than about 10min long

old computer using pinnacle studio didnt seem to have same trouble with tape downloads, now i know why!