Camcorder Advice Please

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SeptimusFry

Senior Member Location: Brittany, France Joined: Feb 02, 2008 12:43 Messages: 243 Offline

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Dec 14, 2011 06:41

I am considering buying an HD camcorder and looking at Canon offerings (just a historic preference, not a question of careful assessment) I can see a nice model HF-M41 which comes in at about £500-550.

One thing I would like to do is record stuff at higher frame rates and then replay at lower frame rate so as to watch in 'slow motion', only a factor of about 4:1, but this camera will definitely not do that.

I had a feeling that PD offers some editing mode which is effectively interpolating the missing frames and making an interpolated slow motion - or is this just wishful thinking on my part? If not, is there any 3rd party software which will do some stretching like this?

Otherwise, if you know of a camcorder which is likely to be able to do this natively, no more than about £1000, I would appreciate any suggestions.

[edit @ 12:10GMT] Ok, I have found the trick in PD and given it a quick whirl. It looks good but a bit jerky in places. I would be interested in others' comments on choice of camcorder though. For example, I realise that shooting at 60 and editing at 24 will give me true slow mo of nearly a factor of 2. Can PD handle this technique?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Dec 14. 2011 07:11

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Dafydd B

Senior Contributor Joined: Aug 26, 2006 08:20 Messages: 11973 Offline

Dec 16, 2011 13:24

Hi Denbigh,
End user camera comments often leads to a "mine is really good" reports which is ok but a little difficult to use.

I have found this site: http://www.camcorderinfo.co.uk/ to be pretty good at comparisons. The details of a camera I have were not given correctly. In saying that it did give some good comments and came out high in comparison testing.

I hope it helps.

If your camera has "touch screen" controls, poor you ha ha, ummm, not my favourite addition to the latest cameras. No-one needs lessons in "How to smudge an LCD screen!" ha ha. Carry a good quality glass cleaning cloth in your case, is my "Tip of the day".

Slow Motion, I used it on a 1 second clip and stretched it to 5 seconds.
1920x1080 Progressive, 60fps. I was really pleased with the results.
Scene: An Atlantic Salmon leaping a waterfall - the event happened in a second. Slowing the event to display over a 5 second period ... brilliant as far as I was concerned and the viewer had chance to see the salmon leaping.

I have not done the test you've asked about.

Dafydd

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at Dec 16. 2011 13:58