ProRes Conversion Times

I've noted before that I'm getting better than 50% realtime performance with my Mac Pro Quad Core 3.0 when converting to ProRes. But this is using a SD card reader plugged in to a USB 2 port. With the Canon HG-20, we were using the internal HDD and because of this we had to plug the camera directly in to the computer with the provided USB cable. The resulting transcode times nearly doubled. We shot about 3 hours of material with this camera and it took a little under 3 hours to transcode. So basically you trade the convenience of having an internal storage option with the Canon with much slower transcoding times.

Note: The Canon HG-20 does accept SD cards, so you can bypass recording to the internal drive you if you so choose.

Another Wedding Down...

We just shot a wedding over the weekend and the results from the HMC150 were impressive. Very little noise and great looking images overall. The only real noise begins to appears at the reception that evening which was indoors. I had to bump up the gain which naturally introduces noise.

I needed to get a second camera, one that was easy for my wife to operate, so we purchased the Canon Vixia HG-20. I wanted to go with a small Panasonic thinking there might be some similarities between my HMC150 and it. However you couldn't buy a Panasonic camcorder with a mic input and a headphone jack for under $1000. With Canon you could, so I settled on the HG-20. It shoots at the full data rate the AVCHD spec offers and it has the combo of an internal drive and can shoot on SD cards. I've looked a lot of the footage so far from the camera and I'm impressed. If you need a second camera, Canon offers a number of options for under $1000 and they include headphone jacks. I mean, seriously, why does Panasonic leave this out?