Working with Casio EX-750 MPEG4
 

Having developed a peculiar passion for a pocketable digital video cam I settled on the Casio EX-Z750. I have 2 Canon GL2 camcorders for weddings but a pocketable digital cam with 640x480 MPEG4 hi quality video intrigued me, especially since 1 or 2 gig memory cards are now available, enabling one to capture over an hour of MPEG high quality video on the cam. Here is a sample of some footage I captured, editable on either Mac or PC with the special codec specified here:

http://homepage.mac.com/bhardy3/iMovieTheater40.html

I set the Casio on the ground and walked several feet away to get the wild ring neck dove. The cam was set in macro mode. Scenes like this are also easily edited in camera also, by the way. When viewed on a TV monitor it is very comparable to a single chip DV camcorder IMHO.

Dunno if it's me, but that didn't work right.

As mentioned on the web page, you cannot see the movie unless you download and install the codec. The link to the codec is on my web page but here it is again:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7231

i installed the kid's codec in the quicktime directory, per the instructions, but it didn't work for me... just a blank white screen on playback... i think that his pc codec install instructions are probably wrong for a win2k machine.

the oreilly review talked about "converting" the original camera files to mpeg4... if they are being re-encoded as part of that "converting" process, the picture quality will get hammered... wonder why you can't play the native video files back?

it's pretty hard to argue with $450, but for $700 i got a panasonic sv-av100 that records mpeg2 to an sd card at ~6mb/second... and while it's a smaller camera to boot, it does take lousy still pictures.

Files can be played on a PC using Windows Media player; you just cannot edit them, however you can edit individual clips in camera. Using Quicktime is another matter; they will not play without the codec. There is other software to make them work however like VLC. Playing the files with the codec left the quality pretty good, but I am unable to play using the Quicktime high quality setting on my PC; the frame rates become very slow on my little Sony T250 laptop. Also once the video is edited in Quicktime WMP will not play it. At this point I am wondering, since the Casio MPG4 can be played on WMP, what is good editing software for MPEG4 for Windows? Is there such a thing as lossless MPEG4 editing? How about a lossless conversion to another format?