Law Students

Video Clips and Recs

By Anonymous

Before I bought my DSLR I assumed I would continue using my little digital camera for the every day stuff and use the new fancy one for holidays or more purposeful photo taking. As it turns out, I haven't used my old Casio since my Nikon D40 arrived in the mail. This is great because I love my D40 and it takes amazing pictures (and is surprisingly light and portable), but I do miss the video capabilities on my little pocket camera. At this age Landon is so active and so funny that I want to capture his movement and speaking more than a still snapshot.

We had a Canon ZR800 before he was born, but as you can see from the clips below, the quality is less than impressive. Even worse than that, transferring the video to my computer is a pain and it takes two programs just to edit and save the clips and then burn them to a DVD (I hate Windows Movie Maker, or I think I hate it, I definitely can't figure out how to make this all work as easily as I'm sure it should. I'm not doing anything fancy- just cutting out parts of the clips I don't want).

So I ask you, my techno-savvy readers- what do you use for capturing video clips? I'm intrigued by the Flip Video products, especially the Ultra HD, but I'm concerned about shakiness in the video (how's that for a technical term). I'd basically be chasing around after Landon and with a device that small it seems like there's often stabilization issues. I could be swayed to go with a digital camera/video combo again, so if anyone has recommendations for one with great video that takes decent pictures, let me know. I'd like to stay under $300, with bonus points for staying well under it. I'd also like something with pretty good quality - these will be our only video from this time in our lives and I'll be burning them to DVDs to save. I understand I won't be getting big screen TV/DVD perfection, I just want them to be fairly clear and bright.

I'm so glad that we got some of his super fast crawling on video too - I think that's our only clip other than a few of his first successful attempts back in May. And below is a clip (Finally!) of his dance moves. The quality is kind of awful and so is the lighting since he prefers to dance in front of the window in the playroom, but at least you get some idea of his skills. He's wearing a swim cap that he picked up on a recent trip to Lane 4 Swim Shops in Austin. He saw the bin and got very excited about the "hats! Mama HATS!" and ran to try to put one on. The owner loved him and sent us home with one in our bag for free- since then Landon asks us to put it on him at least once a day. I swear we're not actually trying to turn him into a swimmer it just seems to be in his blood.

Let me know your recommendations -- good quality, easy to export and share (this is key, I'm good with picture transferring and editing, and apparently suck with video clips), and not so expensive I have to make myself wait until Christmas to buy it!

Full post as published by Lag Liv on August 01, 2009 (boomark / email).