Such a nice day! Made the usual trip on the bike from Weesp to Muiden and back today. Along the river Vecht. And I took my Canon 1000D with me, including the telelens.

Sinterklaas has brought me two presents, a new TV and a new photo camera. This is about the Canon EOS 1000D. More on the LCD tv and the 5.1 home theater set, when I am finished installing all that!

Not that I am dissatisfied with my Canon Powershot A710 IS, not at all. It has proven to be a perfect companion on my travels, delivering good photos. Of course it is a compact camera, with the small size and low weight as advantages, and the disadvantages such as lack of options and noise in low light situations that makes a DSLR more interesting. For taking the standard photos with auofocus, in normal light conditions and reasonable distance, it is a perfect camera. In fact, it is hard to make bad photos with this camera.

My first camera, that served me well, in fact all the older photos on my travel website are made on slides with this camera) was a Practica SLR. Bulky, heavy, three lenses (wide angle, standard, tele), but with all the facilities that make a SLR so much photographics fun.

So I have added a DSLR to my photo equipment, the Canon EOS 100D. Wth the quality I expect from Canon.
A basic setup first, with a 18-55 mm IS lens. Builtin flash, autofocus, Image Stabilization, ISO values usable up to 800, all the manual controls or auto you want. Raw photos, large sensor without noise. It is all there.

The first experiences show me that this is not the userfriendly, point and click, always a good photo, kind of camera like the Powershot. I am totally spoiled by these handy cameras! No, this requires relearning all the trics of a SLR like focussing, zooming, ISO, light, diafragms, with the added DSLR functions like autofocus, basic point and click standard programs and the powerfull ‘creative’ settings.

To my disappointment, the Live View function (showing the picture on the LCD screen like the compact cameras do) is only available with the ‘creative’ programs, not the basic auto settings. This means I have to learn again looking through the camera viewfinder instead of holding the camera at some distance and seeing the picture in preview on the lcd screen. I wear glasses, so I hate to make the glasses dirty by touching with a viewfinder.
Another shock was the noise of the mirror clicking and clacking when taking a picture! This is a SLR!

Technically this is an enormous amount of power. Autofocus is brilliant, with complete control of depth and light. It feels like a real camera, rock steady in your hands, I wish the FS100 video camera was a bit more like this. Much, much to (re)learn.

So what do I take on my next vacation? I am not sure, but the Powershot A710 IS might be a better choice, since it low weight, small, quiet and so easy to handle and with good results. The Canon 1000D will be used for high demanding jobs, like photos of my collection. First photos are on line, on the retro website page on the Cosmicos.

Its autumn. Lots of rain, getting dark early, feeling depressed already due to the lack of daylight. Leave home early, drive in the dark, come home at night in the dark, winter cloths.

So its time now to relive happier summer days, time to do some video editing of the material shot during the Turkey and Jordan holidays with my new Canon FS100 video camera.

First things I see when looking at the material are that the camera performed reasonably well. Not as good as my Canon Powershot 710IS, but it did record acceptable video fragments. And I did record a lot of fragments, covering most of the experiences in Turkey amd Jordan.

As I found out during my first experiments, filming around Weesp, this tiny camera is hard to keep stable, the chest based tripod I carry helped a lot.

Another annoying mistake I made is too much and too fast panning. Keep the camera stable and focussed at one object and do not move it around that much, is the lesson I learned. Keeping it stable is still not easy, even with the chest based tripod I carry around. A one legged tripod would be better, but that is quite a burden to carry.

So now I have lots of material. Good enough to make a movie. Cut away the bad and boring parts, add some photos, titles and some appropiate music, a job for Adobe Premiere Elements. That package served me well in the past, with material in DV AVI format. My old Video 8 and SVHS camera material is now in DV format too, the Samsung DV camera also produced DV AVI format of Venezuela and China.
The Canon FS100 does not produce DV AVI, but MPEG2. They call the file .MOD, but when renamed to .MPG it is accepted as standard MPEG2 format, also by Premiere Elements (I use version 4 now).

But not all was well. First problem was the format, since the FS100 records in 16:9 format (720×576). And Premiere interpreters this as 4:3. I found a program, SDCOPY, that can fix that by setting a flag in the MOD file. Another nice feature of SDCOPY is that allows to rename a batch of files to more meaningfull filenames (year-date/time + free text) instead of the unusable convention chosen by Canon: MOV001.MOD etc. That name convention does not sort well, ofcourse you want the files listed in the order they were recorded. So now I have a collection of files, recognized by Premiere as 16:9 and with convenient names. With this setup I made the test movies around Weesp in may 2008 and all was well then. The .MOD files are quite compact compared to DV AVI, a nice side effect, since video takes lots of disk space.

Alas, the editing of MPEG2 files failed when I threw not a couple of clips into Premiere, but a couple of hundred. The Jordan collection of clips consists of 230 clips, each a file containing 10 second to 2 minutes. From this raw material, over 2 hours, at most a 25 minute documentary will result, and this seems a normal situation for an amateur movie. I did this with my DV material such as made in Venezuela and China. It worked fine, Elements kept responsive with this much clips.
Not with the MPEG .MOD files. After 20 or more clips added to the organizer Elements became slow, reading and reading and refreshing thumbnails. Another 20 more and the program came to a halt, crashed and did not fully recover. No more showing a thumbnail in the Organizer or playing in the preview windows and unusable slow or even not responding. Conclusion: Premiere is not optimized for MPEG2 as source material, it is built for DV AVI. So this was a showstopper. Even removing all the files form the organizer took a lot of effort.

A solution/workaround is now found. It takes more time in preparation, takes even more disk space (DV AVI is about 3x in size then MPEG) and perhaps a little degradation of quality, though I do not feel that as visible. Since Premiere Elements likes DV AVI, the MPEG2 format has to be converted to DV AVI. And there is a perfect free tool for that: Virtualdub and the MPEG2 plugin , and the Mainconcept DV codec (which comes with Elements or the Klite codec pack, cant remember). Virtualdub has a batch facility (called Job control from the File Menu) to do the conversion unmanaged.

These are the steps:

- get Virtualdub and the MPEG2 plugin
- Start Virtualdub, open a .MOD file (File - Open, all files, select a .mod file
- set the Video - Compression setting to MainConcept DV Codec
- Convert one .MOD file with File - Save as AVI
- save the processing settings with File - Save processing settings,for future jobs
- Start the Batch processor, File - Job Control
- Select input and output directories In Job Control Edit - Process directory
- Hit the start button and have a cup of coffee (or two)

Have a look at the configuration of the Mainconcept DV encoder. I had to choose the Change Fields Order option, otherwise the result was horribly out of sync video. Experiment with this before doing a lot of work.

Now you end up with a directory filled with .AVIfiles with the same names as the .MOD files. Start Premiere Elements and the editing process runs smooth with hundreds of clips in the organizer.

I can not see quality degradation as result of the conversion, video is in itself a mediocre format, and the FS100 delivers a bit of noise under not perfect light conditions. Contrast situaltions also cause problems And it degrades in high temperatures, the Dead Sea clips look far from perfect as a result. Wind noise reduction is also a weak point. But the movie turns out quit good, I have fun with it. Now to find some one to show the movie too …

A new toy, a hitech video camera. After having used for two years a Samsung VP-D361 mini DV cam and being quite disappointed with the quality of that device (auto focus was off most of the time, and it failed on me when I was in China in the Forbidden City, the tape motor could be heard and fire-wire transfer is awkward) I decided to look at a better quality but affordable camera. For me quality means reliability, small, low weight, easy to carry and easy to add to my current video setup and reasonable video quality. Since my video equipment is not the latest and the greatest HD 1080p home Cinema type, the preferred video editing software is Premiere Elements 4, most of the movies are of the holiday memory kind and the budget limited to 400 euro I quickly abandoned the higher quality HD camera’s like the Canon HV30, HG10 or HF10. Those cameras, especially the flashcard based HF10 did meet the demands of being small and low weight and exceeded the video quality demands, but are quite expensive (900 euro) and generate video files in a format not easy to work with, like the AHVCD format on the HF10. A flashcard is quite attractive, no moving parts, so it is reliable, small and so easy to read the video files into the PC environment.

So I looked around and saw Canon, who also made my excellent Powershot A710is digital camera, announced the consumer flashcard based FS series video cameras. The FS100 is the one I selected, the cheapest of the series because no flash memory is built in. And I like that, flash cards are getting cheaper and higher capacity every day. It is not a HD camera, but a modest 1 million pixel camera with 16:9 wide screen or standard 4:3 dimensions. I have added an 8 GB Transcend Class 6 SHDC and a 16 GB Class 6 SDHC card.

After having to wait several weeks after pre-ordering it, showing my faith in Canon to deliver a quality device, it arrived this week. I paid 319 euro for the camera via internet at the dutch store fotokonijnenberg A good shop, recommended! No doubt it will fall in price a bit, but right in my budget. As you can see in the gallery above, it is quite a small and light device. The video quality did not disappoint me. It is not the best of course, but value for money. With enough light a sharp and (typical Canon) colorful image. Indoor the noise makes it not that good, the built in LED lamp helps a bit.

If you want to see a sample, proofing that zooming and autofocus works quite well, but shooting from the hand makes a shaky image, look here. Download the file and open it with e.g. Windows Media Player I should have used a tripod! This is the file straight from the flash card, type .mod, which is actually an mpeg2 file. Windows Media Player (and Photoshop Elements) understand this format, as do dvd players like WinDVD.

My first impression of the device is that it works well in normal light conditions. Convenient to operate due to light weight and small dimensions, but hard to keep a steady image. Flash cards are the way to go, like with my digital camera. like it, recommended!

Edit: on request a fragment shot inside (a church in Jordan).

Edit: Flash format video fragments here. I have taken the camera on two vacations (Jordan, Turkey) and around my hometown. 

Edit: My experiences with editing are described here. SDCOPY, Virtualdub, Premiere Elements helped me.

I was quite pleased with the Canon Powershot 420 I took with me to Venezuela. After the first day I switched form the inferior Fuji E500 to this conventient camera and it served me well the rest of the vacation in Venezuela. Since this camera was meant for my friend in Venezuela, I shipped it to Caracas on my last day in Porlamar.

So I was in the market for a new camera. Canon is my choice of manufacturer, though I am still pleased with my Casio QV400.
What I wanted was:

After some research and reading reviews I stumbled upon the recently introduced Canon Powershot A710 IS, a 7 megapixel, 6x zoomlens with a quite large lcd screen. The price is reasonable too (244 euro), it fits my specifications, and it feels easy to handle.

So here it is: my new camera for the next holidays, ready for some tests the next weeks: