JD - Using New Cameras

In our last lesson with Mrs Johnson on Friday the 10th, we looked at the new HD video cameras for the first time. This gave us a chance to try them out an explore their features that the DV video cameras didn't have. A good point about the new cameras is that they have pretty much the same layout as the old DV cameras so they are very quick and easy to get used to. The new cameras also have a touch screen. This allows for an easier to access and use menu. The touch screen is also used when the manual features are selected, for example, when manual focusing you use the touch screen to adjust the focus. The HD cameras record the AVC HD format onto an SD card rather than onto a DV tape which results in much greater quality footage. It also means that there is no need to capture the footage to the computer as each clip is saved as a seperate file to the SD card. This will save time as the files can just be dragged and dropped into a seperate folder which will allow more time for editing. They also connect to the computers via USB instead of Firewire. This makes the cameras much easier to connect to different computers. The school has also just got Adobe Premier Elements 8 which allows us to edit the higher quality HD footage more easily than the previous version of Adobe Premier.