Canon HF20

After our very old Sony camcorder died on the day of our sons last-day-of-Pre-School program I have been on the search for a replacement video camera. Our Sony MiniDV camera (TRV-17) lasted us many years and I was quite sure it wouldn't be worth having it repaired. There are so many different kinds of cameras, formats, models, brands....it was a bit overwhelming. After doing a quick look online at BestBuy to get an idea of price ranges I decided to research only Canon cameras. They seemed to be more in my price range and had more of the features I wanted.

We ended up getting the Canon HF20 High Definition camcorder. It records to 32GB of internal flash memory and is expandable via an SD card slot. It records to a very good looking but very compressed HD format called AVCHD. For anyone looking to buy a camera that records this format, BE SURE to download sample clips and make sure your computer can play them. It is a very processor intensive format and requires a lot of power just to play the files. Our Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz running Vista Ultimate 32bit has no trouble playing and editing, but our AMD TurionX2 @ 1.8GHz laptop running Vista Home 32bit and our Intel Celeron @ 2.6GHz desktop running XP can't play the files well at all.

I had wrestled for a long time trying to decide whether we should get a file based recording system versus a tape based recording system like HDV. HDV records to a MiniDV tape and all video capture is therefore realtime via FireWire 400. AVCHD is just a file transfer over USB2.0 for video capture. So if you record 30 minutes of video on a HDV tape and want to edit it, you need to capture all 30 minutes in real time before you can start editing. With AVCHD, you transfer the files and can start editing within about 5 minutes.....HUGE time saver. This was a big selling point for me bacause the reason I hardly ever edited the video I shot previously was because it took so long to put in on the computer to begin with.

While you save a lot of time getting the video on your computer using AVCHD, you do sacrifice some time at the end of the edit when you export a file. Again it is a very processor intensive format so the computer must decode, then re-encode the video to make a new file to save on your computer. On my Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz, it is about a 5:1 ratio for export. For every 1 minute of edited video, it takes aobut 5 minutes to export. Luckily it is something you can set and forget, let it run overnight or while you're eating dinner.

Very happy with the camera so far. Here are some things I really like about the Canon HF20:
File based video transfer
Expandable memory
Takes HD still photos while shooting video
Built in video light and flash
Small, small small small!! Can fit into a big jacket pocket easily.
At the middle recording mode (of 5 settings) can hold about 6 hours of video on internal memory
Plenty of manual settings (Aperture, Exposure, Focus etc...)

Here are some not so cool things:
90 minute battery life with stock battery (seems short to me)
You must plug camera into the wall power to transfer files from internal memory
Need a pretty beefy computer to play back files
Long export time for edited videos

Obviously if the bad things I listed were deal breakers I would return the camera....but realistically all the pros heavily outweight the cons in my mind. Quality of the video is quite good. Low light could be better I suppose, but to get the low light quality you'd need to spend a LOT more money on a camera with 3 chips....way out of my price range. The HF20 got really good reviews on cnet.com and also on Amazon.com (my two favorite places to get info on electronics). Besides, CNET says it is on par with other cameras in its class.

I edit video on Adobe Premiere CS4 and have had very good results. The camera did come with some editing software that says it's able to put your edited video back on the camera....I have not yet tried it. Since the camera has HDMI out, HD/SD Component out, and composite out, there are plenty of ways to watch your video from the camera without the need to edit it. We don't have and HD TV in our house, so putting video back on the camera doesn't make sense for us. So really at this point we have no way of even watching our HD home videos, but I figure one day we will and it will be nice to have some HD footage of the kids growing up. I've posted a few videos already on Facebook, they look quite good I'd say.

THe price of hard drives is coming down so quickly, that finding a reasonably priced hard drive to store all this priceless footage will be easy. Almost every week I get some sort of email advertising name brand 1TB hard drives for less than $100. Copy the footage to one of these in an external enclosure, pop it in the fire safe for worry free long term storage.