Camera/Format specific sub-forums

[Derek Heeps]

As a relative newcomer to this site , a couple of things have struck me - please forgive me for asking these questions if they have been brought up before .

To set the background , I started reading this forum a few months ago after my old faithful Sony DCR VX-1000 died , and I started thinking of moving to HD . There were a number of different formats to look at and this place seemed to contain a lot of useful info , living fully up to its name !

Anyway , I was considering going down the HDV route , which would have involved little change in workflow from my present one , or going solid state with an AVCHD camera , which would have been totally different .

The difficulty for me is that here in Scotland there seem to be no pro video dealers where you can walk in and try out kit ; the best I can do is some of the general photographic places and electrical retailers who have some of the better domestic kit - hence I have had a play with the likes of the Panasonic X-900 and similar , recording trial pieces onto my own SD cards and taking them home for evaluation .

That alone highlighted the problem , for me , that my Mac G5 which has been happily editing my DV footage with FCP for the last several years will struggle to cope with some HD material .

The long and the short of it was that , just a couple of weeks ago , I was offered a pair of JVC GY-DV500's which were being disposed of . These were bodies only , but I already had one lens and quickly bought another for the second camera ; the decks had very low hours , having mainly been used in a studio just as cameras , and are effectively brand new . I have played with them a bit , ran a few tapes through them and satisfied myself that they are working well . Since I now have two decent DV camcorders which will keep me going for a while , I will probably upgrade my computer first to a MacPro to make my editing capabilities fully HD ready , then look again at cameras in another year or two .

What strikes me about this forum is that it is , perhaps rightly , focussed tightly on HD kit as that is what a lot of people are using , with specific sub-forums concentrating on a number of ranges of cameras .

However , I know that there are also a lot of people around ( especially students ) using the likes of Sony VX-1000 , VX-2000 , PD150 , PD170 ; Canon XL-1 , XM-1 , XL-2 ; JVC GY-DV500 , GY-DV5000 ; Panasonic AG EZ-1 , DVC15 , DVC 60 etc , etc . ( I see that some of these are actually covered , buried in amongst some of the HD cameras , but not so readily visible , and in the case of JVC there is no coverage of their Std Def cameras ) .

One also sees a lot of DVCAM and DVCPRO standard def ENG kit going on eBay for very reasonable money and no doubt finding its way into the hands of wedding videographers , amateur moviemakers and others who do not come from a background of broadcast video , therefore will be looking for some technical help .

Probably a lot of the people with these sorts of cameras , bought secondhand , are the very ones who are relatively new to digital video and perhaps have the most to learn ?

Would it not therefore make sense to have a section of the forum dedicated to standard definition DV , and some sub-forums for the more popular DV camcorders such as the ones I mentioned above ?

I think this would make it easier for those starting out in DV with cameras such as the ones above to find information relevant to their needs ; what does everyone else think ?