25 budgies with beer on the perch, 25 budgies with beer…

I had considered buying a digital camcorder several times last year (the closest I came was a Sony HDR-SR1), but in the end I always shied away from it because the HD quality didn’t seem quite good enough yet, and a better camera is released every 2 months. The cameras could only do interlaced HD footage, HDV tapes are only MPEG-2, AVCHD doesn’t have good editing support and fills up your harddrive…etc. pp.

But in the end you can wait forever and never buy anything, and true 1080p support in a consumer camera is still a few years away. So when the Canon HV20 was announced, I decided to order one. The HV20 is using HDV tapes and is still bound by the HDV specs, so it can’t do true 1080p. But it can do anamorphic 24p as well as anamorphic 1080i@60hz, and the CMOS sensor manages the picture at true 1920×1080. That’s pretty damn neat for 1100 bucks. Now I can document whatever I want to document. It’s fun

I wanted to do some 24p tests to see how well the motion blur works and how much light I’d need to shoot this kind of footage (Hint: more than I used in that clip). So I aimed the camera at my birds and waited. Here’s a small clip of Jerry and Cloud at full resolution. That’s glorious 1920×1080, progressive scan…and then downsampled into a wmv file I didn’t have enough light in the room, so the image is kind of dark and flat. Still very neat, though. You can also download the clip here (Save As), it’s 8.5mb.