Sony HDR-CX7 HD Camcorder, cont'd

Since the camcorder fits in my jacket pocket, I took it with me in the cab this morning and shot a number of different but completely boring bits of video. Mostly, just looking to test things like slow pans, fast moving things, what colors look like at different settings and so on.

I also shot in a couple of different resolution modes.

Switching modes, adjusting different settings and so forth is really a much easier task with the camcorder's touchscreen menus which, (in all honesty) I was not too thrilled about when I first used it... But the fact is, they actually did this right and the learning curve is hardly as steep with this menu system than it could've been. It's actually very well designed. You don't have to wade through deepening menu items, since all the various trees you could've descended into are now tabbed onscreen. Very VERY easy system to learn and use.

Everything looks fabulous and fantastic when played on the computer and on the regular TV, but knocking it down to online streaming size is still a set of steps that I haven't correctly hit upon yet. With 7 source modes and all sorts of other editing and compression options, it's an astronomical number of possible combos...

This pic and the other one above were taken in highest resolution still shot mode (2848 x 2136, 16m colors), then re-sized to 640 x 480 and saved at 30% filesize for uploading, which knocks them down a bit more on the blog page. Click on either pic for a larger image.

The first pic is the same scene as for the beginning of the video clip (below) and the second pic is the same scene as for the end of the clip.

The video clip was shot in SD SP mode, 720i, and stored as MPEG-2 on the camcorder memory card. I transferred the MPEG-2 file onto the computer, imported it to MediaStudio Pro, added the title and begin/end fades, and created a letterboxed QuickTime H.263 (320 x 200) clip file that got uploaded to Google Video:



For the QuickTime rendering step, I'm still monkeying with square vs non-square pixel setting, source clip media option of interlaced or non-interlaced prior to rendering, and the most problematic setting of all which is the aspect ratio setting for the letterboxing. I uploaded four different test variations, and the one above came out the best so far. But I have a lot more variations that I can still try to minimize the pixelization on that final rendering (which I have absolutely no control over) that's done "on the fly" when I upload.