Hard drive camcorders?

[UniGeezer]

@Anyone

No I’m sorry I don’t.
I’ve never used a Hard Drive Camcorder, Windows kinda sucks, so I dont have Movie Maker. Sorry not really my fault though.
And since I dont I cant really help you:(

You’re not the anyone I was looking for…note the * on either side.

[patmoore]

Cool skydiving videos

@dangerlaef

I’ve been using MiniDV for skydiving for 8 years.

For me, there are distinct advantages to having removable shareble media.

While it is “possible” to back up HDD camera material & keep it for years,
in reality I would only occasionally be bothered to back it up, it is much easier to keep tapes.

Another advantage with DV is that you can give the tape to someone else to copy/edit while continuing to use the camera. For example, at the end of a days jumping we collect the camera-flyers tapes & digitise them overnight & the next day… they keep their cameras & can still use them.

I think the Newest HDD cameras are including fire-wire, so can be captured in the same way as DV-cameras.

The problem there is the video is double-compressed, the HDD camera uses mpg or mpg-4 compression, the converts it to 4:1:1 DV compression, so it would look worse than native DV pictures.

As flash cards get bigger & faster, I expect removable memory card video cameras will eventually be the way to go, but I’m sticking with DV for the moment.

Nice sky diving video! I was the subject of the first-ever air to air videotaping. It was over Zephyrhills, FL and it had to be in the early 70s. The videographer was named Jim Ellmaker. We had to drive to a studio in downtown Tampa to watch the result. It was so jerky we didn’t bother to save it. Ironically my ex-wife also had a major first in the sport - first female to jump a square canopy. It was at Poppenhager’s DZ in Indiantown, FL in 1969. Very little video of me exists from those days although I appear twice in the movie “The Endless Fall” by Mike Swain and once in “Masters of the Sky” by Carl Boenish. I believe both were shot with 16mm film. A helmet-mounted mini-DV camcorder would have made filming a heck of a lot easier.

From 1962 to 1976 I logged a little over 2000 jumps. I understand there are folks with five times that number today.

If you want to have some fun without spending too much money, get a Tony Hawk helmet cam. I bought one on woot.com for about $30. It only shoots at 15 frames per second but it’s very easy to mount to a helmet. Just pop the SD card out and upload it to your PC as an AVI file. Here’s a sample I shot last summer while biking and drafting behind my wife.