Mel and I had been looking forward to heading out to the Wild Animal Park all week so we could try out the new video camera, so this morning when we saw big dark clouds coming we thought for sure our day would be ruined. But we pressed on, making it to the park in time to beat the majority of the crowds. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the clouds from the coast seemed to scatter and dissipate before they reached the park, so we wound up having a beautiful sunny day. We saw lots of animals, I took lots of video, and we ate a tasty (but pricey) lunch at the park.

This afternoon I spent a lot of time editing the video in Final Cut Express (FCE). iMovie ’08 (which I had previously been using to edit videos) is a great program that is easy to use and produces good results, but I was already starting to feel a little limited by it. Making the jump to FCE is huge; it is the same basic program as Final Cut Pro, which is used to edit multi-million dollar movies and TV shows, just missing the more advanced features. Think of it as the Adobe Photoshop of video editing. At first it comes across as a very complicated program, but after spending some time reading the user manual (an 1152 page PDF document) and watching the tutorials on Apple’s website I started to get the hang of it. I can see why people like this program; it allows for a huge amount of control and has some very nice features. It’ll be fun to work with it more in the future. I still have a lot to learn!

And so here it is, my first video from the Sony HDR-SR11 edited in Final Cut Express:

Yesterday was a big day… As soon as 5:00 PM hit, I was out of the office and on the road to go pick up my new toy. It arrived at my house on Friday but nobody was home, so the meanies at UPS held it in their warehouse all weekend. Waiting was painful, but it was certainly worth it. This is one awesome piece of kit!

After spending a significant amount of time mulling over all the pros and cons of HD camcorders, I finally settled on the Sony HDR-SR11. It is an AVCHD camcorder that records to a built-in 60GB HDD. It features a 5.66 megapixel 1/3″ CMOS sensor, 12X optical zoom lens, 3.2″ touchscreen display, viewfinder, 5.1-channel mic, and plenty of other fun features like Nightshot and Slow Motion Recording.

Handling
The first thing I noticed when taking it out of the box was that it has a bit of heft, much more so than the Sony DCR-HC48. This is not a bad thing; it feels very solid and well-built. All of the ports are covered by very robust doors, and the on/off/mode switch, zoom toggle, record button, and other controls feel very substantial and well placed. I like the knurled metal knob at the front for doing manual adjustments of focus, exposure, AE shift, and white-balance shift. The touch screen is beautiful; it’s larger than most and has 921,000 pixels, over four times as many as typical camcorder displays. The touch-screen interface seems straightforward, but it can be difficult to find certain settings at first.

Video Quality and Playback
Video quality is stunning; I took it out in the yard and made some quick videos of flowers and trees, then plugged the camcorder’s USB port into the Playstation 3. I was able to play back the AVCHD files via the PS3 without a hitch, and Mel (my wife) and I were both blown away by the beautiful picture. Color representation seemed very good, as did contrast and sharpness. The zoom is also excellent; at 12x optical, it bests most HD camcorders. The amazing thing is that the digital zoom seems completely useable up to 25x. I noticed no picture degradation, likely because the camera is using the sensor’s extra pixels for the zoom. (Remember, HD video only requires 2.1 megapixels, and this camera has 5.66.)

Editing on the Mac
Without loading any software or drivers, I simply plugged the camera’s USB port into my MacBook Pro, which is a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo “Santa Rosa” model with 2GB of RAM and OS X 10.5.2. Since I took a few still photos, iPhoto launched automatically and offered to download the pictures to my library. That process went very smoothly, just like with any other digital camera.

Next I launched iMovie ’08, which immediately recognized the camcorder and showed a thumbnail of each clip on the camcorder’s HDD. iMovie also allowed me to play back previews of the clips and to deselect any unwanted clips prior to transfer. This sure beats tape-based camcorders! I recorded only 1 minute and 20 seconds of video, but it took around 5 minutes to transfer and transcode. So far this seems to be the only real downside to AVCHD. The video also ate up a whopping 1.36 GB of disk space… Ouch! Once the video was on my computer, editing was very snappy; moving clips around and adding transitions and effects seemed as fast as with SD footage from the DCR-HC48. The only time I noticed some slight hesitation was during transitions when previewing the movie full-screen.

I used Quicktime to export the movie at 720p for upload to Vimeo using the instructions found here. Exporting the 51 second movie took about 10 minutes and resulted in a 32.2 megabyte file. You can watch the video in SD Flash below, or click the link to go to Vimeo and watch in HD Flash or download the Quicktime file (bottom right corner of Vimeo page).

Overall I’m very pleased with the camcorder so far. I’m looking forward to spending more time with it this weekend. Because this camcorder touts “10MP still images”, I plan on doing a little write-up on the still photo performance soon. Hopefully someone out there is interested in all this gobbledegook, but at least I’m having fun being a geek and playing with my toys!

UPDATE 3/31/08 The still image testing of the HDR-SR11 is now available here.

‘Twas a good easter weekend. The weather was phenomenal; it felt just like summer. It was probably in the mid-80′s both yesterday and today. We kept the windows and curtains closed in the house part of the day because it was so hot… We haven’t done that since September.

Yesterday was our monthly top-to-bottom house cleaning day. (We try to schedule a certain day, otherwise we’ll find a good reason to keep putting it off.) Today we started things off with a tasty breakfast. Last night I put the ingredients in the bread machine for the super easy and tasty Amish Bread, and this morning I awoke to tasty bread aromas. We sliced the bread and made french toast and scrambled eggs, then ate out on our patio. Delightful! The scent of flowers was in the air and it was a really warm and pleasant easter morning.

After breakfast we headed out to the Santa Margarita River park in Fallbrook. In all my years of living down here I’d never explored this place, which is a shame; it was great. A nice flowing river (more like a creek by non-Southern California standards) with a great trail beside it shaded by lots of bit oak trees. Overall a very peaceful and relaxing place that reminded us both of places farther north. The grass was nice and green by the river, but it seems that the flowers are past their prime and the grass is starting to turn brown everywhere else. Spring happens quick down here… It’s a good thing easter came early this year.

Hope everybody else’s easter was nice, and you all were lucky and got those tasty round little brown chocolate balls that the easter bunny scattered around my yard. Mmm mmm!

As you may have noticed, I’ve made a few videos with my Sony DCR-HC48 camcorder. This model is a middle of the road Standard-Definition (SD) unit that records to Mini-DV tapes. I chose this model because the High-Definition (HD) versions are pricey, and at the time I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make a huge investment in videography. After spending some time with it, I can safely say that the little Sony is a perfectly good camcorder, but I’ve been completely spoiled by watching HD movies and TV. Although the videos look decent at the resolution shown on this site (500 x 281), they look blurry and pixelated on an HDTV or full-screen on a computer monitor. Video can convey a lot more information than a still photo, but (to me) a good photo from a nice digital camera still has a lot more visual impact than an SD video clip.

So photography wins? No way! I really enjoy videography; it adds new dimensions to all the things I like about photography. Add that to the fact that latest HD camcorders produce stunning footage at resolutions higher than a typical computer monitor (1920 x 1080), and videography in HD starts to become pretty darned compelling.

But making the leap to filming in HD raises a lot of big questions. So what’s involved? Here’s what I’ve found out.

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One of the best parts of living in Southern California is the multitude of climate choices it presents; this time of year there are snow-capped mountains and warm desert valleys within 30 miles of one another. Being quite fond of warmth and sunshine, we took a quick overnight trip to the Palm Springs area last weekend.

The weather was awesome (mid-70′s and clear blue skies) and the drive out was beautiful. The areas ravaged by fire in the fall have risen from the ashes in the spring, with beautiful California Poppies and other varies of flowers carpeting the formerly blackened hillsides. I also got to stretch my car’s legs a little on the back roads; a welcome change after slogging through commuter traffic every day.

While we did enjoy the typical lazy escapes of lounging by the pool and eating tasty food, we also decided to try The Living Desert Wildlife and Botanical Park, which was a pretty awesome experience. Living in the zoo capital of the world, you’d think we’d be tired of them, but this place had enough of a different spin on things that it was really refreshing. There were lots of great garden exhibits with cacti galore, plus some pretty interesting animals. I made a short video of the park, which you can watch below.

(Music is the rather inaptly named “Rain in Vancouver” by Teru.)

Today I decided to try out time lapse photography for myself. Here’s what I came up with. Made using the “Smooth Interval Recording” feature of my Sony DCR-HC48, iMovie, and Garageband for composing the music.

I’ve been intrigued with Time Lapse since I saw some awesome scenes on the show Survivorman. Here are a couple of other examples from Vimeo. (Choose the link to watch the second in HD.) Perhaps I’ll try this myself sometime…