General Camera Stuff - Whenever you get a new camera, you have to change the settings from AV to headphones. Otherwise you'll hear lots of static.
Camera brands - We needed two new cameras for the EPSRI this year. The model of video cameras we have used in the past, Canon FS200, have been discontinued, and the new model, Canon FS400, does not have a microphone jack. As an alternative, we ordered a couple of the Canon Vixia HF R200, which was nearly the same price, but records in HD, which seemed like an unnecessary but possibly nice feature. These cameras turned out to be a huge headache. They record in a weird file format (.mts), which can be watched but not edited, and it takes forever to convert them to an editable format. In addition, if there is any high speed motion (which there often is in our data), the picture becomes blurry. So much for HD being higher quality! This never happened with our old cameras. We're sending these cameras back and ordering refurbished FS200 cameras.
Wireless headphone brands - Last year we started using Sennheiser wireless headphones so we don't have to be near the camera to take field notes. This year we decided it was critical to have four sets of these so all the scholars taking field notes could listen without being tied to the camera. However, the headphones only have three channels (926 MHz, 927 MHz, 928 MHz), so we couldn't use four sets without them interfering. I did some research into different brands and found that Sony makes wireless headphones which have three channels that are different (915.5 MHz, 916.0 MHz, 916.5 MHz), so we ordered a couple sets of these.
After trying out both brands, I think the Sony headphones are definitely superior. They have less static, are easier to tune, and the headphones fit more comfortably on your head. Also, they have a nifty feature where they turn on automatically when you put them on your head and turn off when you take them off. We had to read the user's manual to figure out how to turn them on, but now that we know, it's pretty cool. They do need to be charged for 16 hours before you can use them, which is important to know. We ordered one refurbished set that just wouldn't charge at all, but I think that set was just defective and we sent them back.
I'm sorry that the file format of the cameras is a pain to deal with. However, the conversion time is probably not directly caused by the file format but rather by the HD resolution. The video is recorded in MUCH higher resolution than with the FS 200 cameras, which means that the converter has to deal with much more pixels.
ReplyDeleteAs for the blurriness, we encountered the same problems when we were trying to find a suitable converter program. However, the ffmpeg conversion creates perfect videos without any blurriness. I'd be happy to try again to get it to work on your machines when I'm there in August.
Hi Benedikt, Thanks for the offer, but we've already returned them. Also, the blurriness was there even in the original file, not an artifact of conversion.
ReplyDeleteSince they're already sent, it's not so important to say that QuickTime wasn't working and was blurry with us, but Movist (using ffmpeg as the codec) worked really well. This is for all those MTS files that you have... Download Movist from Macupdate and it should be a lot less fuzzy.
ReplyDeleteApparently we fixed the problem you're talking about, but there is a separate problem with a kind of blurriness that is there in the originals and not just on quicktime. Also, a few of the files are just refusing to be converted.
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