I've been trolling thru' this and other forums recently, trying to catch up on new technology. I used to VJ and had to generate and edit my own video. I used a Miro DC30 with 3dsmax & Povray with Premiere to do the editing. Twas a major pain in the ass just getting the material off the pc onto a decent medium to play it back; yes no DVD writers back then mate!

OK the main pain was having to render to fields all the time especially if I needed smooth motion and even more so if I mixed animation and real video together. Hopefully all this is now not nessesary and I can render to frames, burn to DVD or even BLU-RAY and have nice looking projected animation.
I'd like to use a video camera as well and all this compatability stuff / wont play on my PS3 is of no interest, as are any, it can take pictures too / in camera editing, effects nonsense ALL of no interest. I need a camera which will capture 720p at 25fps that works, no stuttering no dodgy codecs, just works! It must be able to be fully manually controlled and take an external mike and I don't mind doing any hardware mods as I'm an electronic techi; oh and I dont need the latest model either.
Handy if it did good ol' PAL too!
Prefer SD but HDD ok, NO tape!

Suggestions please, I'd be v.greatful

Regards

Stretchy.

[rhubarbe]

I don't think that there is one. The only cams I know of that output 25p native only do so at 30fps, and they don't do SD PAL.

Oh, and they all encode using dodgy mp4 codecs...

Others may know more than I do, of course.

[glesgaguyav]

And I may be entirely wrong but If you are looking for smooth motion then I don't think that Progressive video is the answer, It seems that Interlaced video is far better at handeling motion than progressive from all accounts I have read.

[senu]

720p is mainly JVC HDV ( tape) territory
Currently HDV do 1080i and you dont want tape anyway. Those HD ( Panasonic, Sony XDCAM, SRCAM ect are Pro to broadcast territory AFAIK)

All the consumer high def HDD models use AVCHD and either do 1080i or recent ones 1080p

AVCHD is mpeg4 H.264 and hardly frame based, as AVCHD, like HDV is a compressed format which uses GOPs in an interframe compression mode

The Sanyo Xactis do 720p but they use mpeg4 too and SD card
I wonder if what you want actually exists.
Ill be quite happy to be informed of its existence in Prosumer kit or if it actually exist at all...
It may well exist in Pro/Semi Pro kit as Panasonic, JVC have all manner of exotic formats but mainstream Hi def now is 1080i and not frame based ..
And non-tape formats are strictly consumer based.
The "higher end ones" I hinted at are niche TBH

[glesgaguyav]

Originally Posted by senu

The Sanyo Xactis do 720p but they use mpeg4 too and SD card

They also shoot at 30fps so are effectivley NTSC cams

Thanks for the replies chaps, its given me somewhere to start. Regarding smoothness of playback, I'd like the option of a frame based video camcorder for ease of editing use but would use interlaced footage when needed.

If you google 'Sanyo Xactis' this thread is the first hit! This may be a useful camera to me.

Thanks all.

Stretchy.