What type of camera is best for model railway?

I have checked categories C V and P in the Index, but there doesn't seem to be anything about which video camera is the best for making mini movies of our trains.

The choice seems to be between High Definition and Standard Definition.  The standard definition appear to be about half the price of HD and have up to 40 gigabytes of memory.

There seems to be another choice of platforms, but the hard drive type seem to be the most prolific.

The zooms seem to be mostly optical up to about 45x which seems to be more than adequate for a layout.

Some offer firewire connection, but I couldn't get any real help with exactly what that is.  I understand that provides fast uploads to the computer, but whether it affects picture quality is unclear.

A final category is sound quality.  Will the built in microphone deliver sufficient quality to allow graphic equalisation and other sound editing - or is it necessary to have a camera with a separate microphone input jack?

The cameras I looked at are the JVC MG-330 and 345.  Google and Yahoo7 were unhelpful on finer details I needed.

Has any member any experience in this area?  I have none.  My little Sony P100 takes passable stills and will do better when it learns to operate me, but it's video results rate as average to appalling.

I think this is the first time the subject has come up Max with regard to actual cameras and their capabilities, or otherwise, although the idea of train mounted video cameras has been suggested before.

Max

Having a firewire connection will purely speed up the transfer rate between your video camera and your PC  USB and Serial is purely a much slower tranfer rate.

The Hd SD thing really depends on you .on your telly yes it will look better but bear in mind if you uploaded a HD file to youtube it would be massively bigger than an sd one. and i am not sure even if you can upload HD youtube files.

But i would imagine any HD camera would allow SD recording as well though.

The rest of your questions i do not know answers to

cheers Brian

Max i have just got a Sony dcr-hc27 handycam,it has mini tape
recording,so far i have done a test vid with it and the results are very good
clear pics good sound and real easy to use, the night mode is brill
it records via infra red.
the downside on this model is no computer software,so i have to sort out getting things on the comp,there is a newer model with a memory card and software
but it was beyond my price range.
have a look on the Sony site for more info,then on e-bay for price.

:cheerslol::cool:

Thanks guys.  I did read the post on the train mounted one.  It is very good.  My local camera shop has a rental system available.  If I can't make up my mind, maybe I might try a few that way.  Otherwise, the hard drive one seems to be the way to go.

I reckon Brian is right about high definition.  The shop people did say that it is more for the people who want to replay their videos on their HD television sets.  The HD cameras are also two to three times the price.

I'll keep digging.  Cheers. Max

Max, although I don't have a video camera at present, I have owned a few in my time and used them extensively. So for what it's worth here's my thoughts :-

Unless you intend to sell off all your railway equipment and take up making movies, forget a high definition model. For what the average user wants from a video camera, standard definition is more than adequate and will give excellent results.

Make sure you buy a model with an optical zoom and not a digital one. The easiest way to destroy picture quality in video (or still) photography is to use a digital zoom, that's why you'll never see a HD camera offered with a digital zoom. 

Don't worry too much about firewire capability, as HP says it will give you a faster transfer rate, but nothing else. It was really developed for video enthusiasts who were downloading large (long) video films, tens of minutes or even 30 minute chunks that took forever to transfer to the computer for editing.

As for sound quality, again it's perfectly adequate on camera, but if you want to accurately record high quality sound, or do a dubbed on commentry, then a seperate microphone is handy.

Finally, I would prefer to buy a video camera packaged with it's own software than not, as it gets you going quicker, but don't pay excessively more for a software packaged camera that offers no better features. Like still camera software, there's plenty of packages around and they are not expensive.

Don't take any of the above as gospel, it's two years or more since I last dabbled, but I hope the above is of help.

Thanks, Jeff.  Your comments are confirming what I suspected.  Think I will go for one like the JVC (hard drive).  It has optical zoom and inbuilt sound, but no mic jack. SWMBO said she will take it over if I need a better unit.

I take it that once I have the video file, I upload it to Photobucket and insert it in posts the same way as for stills?  Cheers.  Max

it is the same as uploading a picture, i have found that sending an email is a lot quicker than using the select file option.

I dont own a dedicted video camera, I have to use the video function on my camera but a couple of thoughts to add to the pot.

If your using it for videoing your layout is size an issue, big cameras dont fit in small spaces to get those close up shots you want.
What will you use the finshed movie for, if you create HD images and plan to share them on youtube, they have a 100mB limit per film and at that size its a big download to watch.
Standard quality will look good on youtube.

Update on lack of progress so far.  The JVC camcorders with hard drives produce files which are notorious for not being able to be imported into movie maker.  They are MOD files, which are apparently in the mpeg family.  I have successfully saved them in My Videos and I can play them on media player, but they will not import into movie maker.

It seems I need a more sophisitcated editing software pack (Ulead) and/or Quicktime Pro conversion software.  I have Ulead on the way, so I will wait for it to arrive and if I still can't import the files, I'll get Quicktime Pro from the supplier as a download.

Also, the MOD files produced by the camera will not upload into Photobucket.

It's interesting that files produced by a relatively expensive hard drive camera can't do what files produced by a cheap Sony Powershot stills camera can do.  I'm just thankful I didn't spent twice the money on a high definition camera which won't do what I want, either. :exclam