I am wanting to buy a new camcorder, preferably one which uses an SD card. Would be great if it did HD, but that's NOT my top priority. I'd rather have good 640 x 480 camcorder which has good image quality/colour definition than an HD one which looks jerky and poor.
What i'm really interested in is a camcorder which will allow me to record clips as one large file rather than creating lots of files which i then have to stitch together !
Can you remember DV Camcorders ? :), well on those types of camcorders you could record a few scenes, switch it off, shoot a few more, switch it off, and when you play it back through the TV the result looks seemless, all the shots blend into one with no noticable pauses from scene to scene.
Every SD camcorder i've had has a noticable pause after each scene (file) which makes it look really poor when putting it onto a DVD straight from the camcorder, (I don't really want to have to combine the files into one big file on the PC).
So, which is the best camcorder out there which will seemlessly combine all scenes into one big scene (file).
Hope i've explained this okay !
By the way, i have the Sony Bloggie HD camcorder, and was wondering if there was any decent freeware program out there which will stitch H264 files together seemlessly ?.... i've got Avidemux but it's a little too complicated for me !
strewth.. if avidemux is "too hard" then you better give it up .. splicing things together is probably the easiest of ANY video editing tool out there...
sd based camcorders don't have a "pause" button.. that went out with tape.. older dv machines were tape based, and on hitting pause actually did a "frame in frame" edit on restart.
guess you will have to learn how the "append" function works with avidemux
Originally posted by andystar: The pause facility was a heck of a useful thing, is it that it can't be done with digital files these days, or is it because the manufacturers didn't bother adding this feature ?, seems a big oversight if the latter because it's much easier for the average bod not to have to sit and edit together all the files after 2 weeks on holiday !!.
I should have worded it a little better, with Avidemux it's not strictly that i don't know how to use it, i have stitched movie clips together from my non-HD camcorders, but Avidemux often complains when i throw H264 files at it, it comes up with errors and pop-ups which i have to constantly click on at every file it loads, which is cumbersome if i'm trying to stitch 20 files together and having to click on "yes" on the 20 times it asks "H264 detected, if the file is using B-frames as a reference it can lead to crashing or stuttering, Avidemux can use another mode which is safe BUT YOU WILL LOSE FRAME ACCURACY. Do you want to use that mode ?". Which is annoying to say the least, if i have a lot of files to stitch!
Even then, sometimes i have no sound (or picture) once they have been "stitched", it seems to like some H264 files from one camcorder better than my other HD Camcorder.
As just one example, if i stitch H264 files from my Sony Bloggie and play it through KMPlayer i have no video, just sound!
Also, Avidemux won't load some mpeg files UNLESS i choose YES to index them, and then i'm left with lots of .idx files scatteres all over my Hard Drive, which is messy. If i don't index them then it complains "Couldn't open file", whereas if i do index them then it loads them with no problem !.... bizarre !!
