Digital cameras for making food videos

Hi,

My old digital camera allowed me to make film clips up to 99 seconds. My current camera goes no longer than 30 seconds, unless I missed a setting. This shift in cameras effectively stopped my wee production of interesting food technique clips.

Recently when LTH's platform began allowing embedded videos, I thought about revisiting this. I went to a lecture this morning on using internet videos to support your business, which further fired me up.

I inquired with the presenters on what they use for their on-the-fly video recording. There were three recs that really were quite different pieces:

- Logitech 9000 - for use with your desktop.
- Flipcamera
- For a built-in camera for a laptop, they liked those in Acer (?) laptops.

Obviously, I am looking for compact. If it can fit nicely in my purse and go everywhere, it will get use. If it requires special space considerations, it will be in the car or at home, which defeats my purposes.

I'm interested in the optimum low cost digital video camera, whether it is new or discontinued. Its been known sometimes an earlier model of a camera had better features than a newer model.

Tips on microphones are welcome, too. I've read you can go cheap with the camera and wise to put money into the microphone. For hosting, I currently use vimeo and youtube.

Any thoughts, tips and hard-earned advice is always welcome.

Regards,

I bought a Flip UltraHD earlier this summer for my wife. She loves it and the video quality is excellent (also plays out directly to TV via HDMI). They have regular-definition options as well, but for a little added cost I prefer the HD. We have a dedicated digital camcorder and a high-res camera that shoots video, but this beats both for ease and convenience. Although it came with a rechargeable pack I find that I get better life from AA batteries. Excellent for low-light conditions.

Hi,

Good to know it works well in low lighting conditions.

If it is shot in HD, can it be saved later in a non-HD format?

What about the microphone?

Thanks!

Regards,

If I was buying a pocket camcorder today I'd get the Kodak zi8, which offers HD video with reasonably decent image stabilization, expandable storage, and a line-in jack for an external microphone.

Selling for $150 with free shipping and no tax at Amazon

Reviews:

CNET
Gizmodo
Digital Camera HQ

edit: do note that you'll need an SD card (like the one in most digital cameras) if you go with the Zi8. It can take SD/SDHC cards up to 32GB, and an 8GB card giving you an hour of recording at the highest quality level, and considerably more at the lowest quality level, will run you $20 or less.

edit 2:

Low light sample video with the Zi8:

gleam wrote:If I was buying a pocket camcorder today I'd get the Kodak zi8, which offers HD video with reasonably decent image stabilization, expandable storage, and a line-in jack for an external microphone.

Selling for $150 with free shipping and no tax at Amazon

Reviews:

CNET
Gizmodo
Digital Camera HQ

Your post & the accompanying relatively glowing reviews got me excited...I've been considering a Flip HD, but this Kodak looked awesome...until I saw this: Bundled software isn't Mac compatible but necessary for smooth playback of 1080p video. Sad trombone.

Hopefully they'll come out with Mac software soon, or someone will discover that it works perfectly with iMovie...that would be sweet.

Khaopaat wrote:Your post & the accompanying relatively glowing reviews got me excited...I've been considering a Flip HD, but this Kodak looked awesome...until I saw this: Bundled software isn't Mac compatible but necessary for smooth playback of 1080p video. Sad trombone.

Hopefully they'll come out with Mac software soon, or someone will discover that it works perfectly with iMovie...that would be sweet.

It does work perfectly with iMovie, and I'd probably urge you to record in 720p anyway, since you'll get higher framerates (up to 60fps) and you don't really NEED 1080p video, since youtube/vimeo/flickr will all scale it down to 720p.

The Flip is iMovie compatible, but their bundled software, FlipShare, is also very useful. It'll do some rudimentary editing, burning to DVD, reducing video size for export to the Web and emailing, and will allow you to create jpg images from any frame of video. It stores 2 hours of video and has a very good quality microphone. It's selling for $161 at Amazon, including the rechargeable battery.