Looking online for info about digital video cameras was frustrating. Whether Canon, Sony, JVC or Hitachi no-one seemed to be able to tell us whether these would connect easily to a mac. So this post is going to give you the info you don’t get on the web.
In the end we had to take a gamble – none of the shops would fire up the cameras – even on external power supply so there was no way to verify manufacturers claims about close focus, image stabilisation – let alone compatibility with a mac G5 running Mac OS X (10.4.2). That put me off buying one duty-free as it would be difficult to return a camera if it proved autistic and refused to talk to the mac.
As luck would have it, despite their no-power-up policy and despite them having macs in the store we still bought from Dick Smith, because of all the shops we went to, theirs was the only one with a ‘change-of-mind returns policy – we could test it for two weeks and if it didn’t do what we hoped, then we could return it for a full refund.
The on we gambled on was a SONY DCRHC38E MiniDV Handycam AU$548. This camera has a Zeiss lens, 40x optical zoom, and up to 2000x digital zoom. So the optical zoom is about twice that of other cameras in its class.
Connecting up
The manual says this is a USB camera, but we bought a firewire cable and found that it fitted the DV OUT port on the camera. After shooting a short piece of video, I fired up the mac, connected the firewire cable and launched iMovie. The camera was recognised straight away and withing minutes the video was downloaded and ready to edit in iMovie. No extra software installation. Just plug and play. So ignore the USB stuff – use the firewire cable straight to the mac.
Now if they had just said so on the various camera websites we could have saved a lot of angst about whether it would connect or not.
The image quality is good, and the camera will focus close enough to show stitching in some detail. The “sport” mode provides image stabilisation, and there is a low-light night setting that uses infra-red to enhance the picture quality. There’s a heap of other settings to capture good colour for sunsets and sunrises, touch screen spot focus, deep shadow settings, and so on. Here’s a short sample showing my complete ignorance, both of video camera operation and editing in iMovie 🙂
I haven’t found any still camera settings yet – but then I bought it for its qualities as a video camera.
It’ll get a good workout in Auckland New Zealand next week, and I’ll blog a bit more about my travels as time and internet connections permit.
Posted by Jerry on March 20th, 2007 — Posted in Journal
This is a test embedding a YouTube file in a post 🙂
And it works!
Okay here’s how – noting that this is a WordPress.org blog, not wordpress.com (ie self-hosted wordpress blog) you go to ‘Users’ in the main menu, then scroll down to uncheck the “Use the visual rich editor when writing” box and then copy and paste the ’embed’ code from the YouTube video and hit save. And that’s it – no plugins needed 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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What a gem! Sharon came across a wonderfully quirky site dealing with pre-digital technologies that addressed the communicative and interactive needs of today. So they were technologies ‘before their time’.
The Museum of Lost Interactions showcases real devices from times past – up to 1970 – that gave people portable wireless communication with a telegraphic PDA using Morse code through to portable video players that filled a need currently occupied by the new iPods and 3G phones. The multi-track recording device for studio remixing – onto wax cylinders was quite a highlight!. It’s a fascinating site that in some cases reinforces the notion that it can take time for society to catch up with an emerging technology and find uses in daily life – or perhaps it’s the other way around? Equally, sometimes the social need is there, but the technology needed to make it a social phenomenon has yet to be developed. So this museum showcases some interesting dead-ends in the tree of technology innovation.
Well I got a bit distracted by St Paddy’s day preparations and fitting the topcase to my own bike, but Eve’s bike fired up today and settled quickly into a steady purr.
What else needed to be done? When I assembled it I aligned the top-dead-centre mark on the crankshaft with the cams leaving the valve tappets just loose enough to move, tightened down all the bolts to the right torque and tried the engine movement without a spark plug and noticed a tight spot and a metallic ticking sound. hmm. Could the valve timing be out? Yup – it could. You see, when I assembled it it was getting dark and what I thought was the dot on the cam sprocket turned out to be a speck of oil.
Today I came at it with a fresh eye and it is the work of only about half an hour to undo the two bolts retaining the cam sprocket and identifying the real dot (actually an engraved small circle) and with the sprocket loose, I was able to flip the cam chain over a few links until the dot was in exactly the right place – aligned with the V mark on the head. It was a quick matter then to replace the relevant covers, give the engine a kick over to hear nothing but smoothly interacting machinery, then change the oil, replace the spark plug, and with two kicks the engine purred into life with a nice quiet smooth new-engine sound. Success!
A few revs and it was apparent that the cam chain was making a little bit of noise, so I adjusted the tension bolt and the engine became even quieter.
First test ride was down to the local service station for fresh fuel and tyre pressure check, and despite the welcome rain the bike performed very well.
And the beauty of it is that it no longer blows smoke, and it has real pulling power. Not bad for my first ever piston change – and it cost only the new piston, rings, gaskets and cylinder machining – you certainly can save a lot by doing it yourself!
Posted by Jerry on March 19th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Music
Well, I promised some audio from St Patrick’s Day – and some audio of the newly repaired violin, so it seems a good idea to combine the two 🙂
The first tune is Ashokan Farewell, written in 1986 by Jay Ungger, about the town of Ashoka – and farewell to the town as it disappeared beneath the artificial lake created by a dam – in much the same way that part of old Canberra was submerged to make way for the artificial lake. So I guess that makes Canberra and Ashoka sister cities. It’s a lovely tune. [NB: It was recorded at a high level – so you may wish to turn down the volume on your computer first] 😉
The second tune is a kind of ‘wall-of-death’ version of a reel called Tongadale(not to be confused with a small Pacific Islands nation). As St Patrick’s Day gathered momentum, so did our music, culminating in a somewhat blistering pace that just seemed to get faster as the night went on 🙂
