It’s nice to see that DVguru agrees with my opinion that DVD camcorders are a little annoying.

As I mentioned I have a few friends that have the Sony DVD camcorder and they seem to really like them. I have also seen them scrambling to change the discs while taping longer events like recitals.

Remember that these camcorders record in MPEG format which is not the best choice at all when editing videos.

I’m glad there are choices but a DVD camcorder is not for me. I would rather get a hard drive camcorder instead.

I update my PC recommendations for video editing. This year the clear choice is a computer with the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor. There are few different flavors of this processor available. The good news is that even the lowest processor in this line, the E6300, blazes.

The sweet spot for pricing is the E6300 or E6400. Both of the have 2MB of L2 cache while the higher level chips have 4MB of L2 cache.

I was able to price together a rather nice Dell PC with an E6300 for about $850 with a 19″ monitor.

Brick House by The Commodores is one of the ringtones on my wifes Motorola E815.
brick house.mid

It is a midi file and I’m pretty sure it just worked on her phone as is.

I think it’s pretty cool to have some 70’s songs for ringtones for those old enough that lived the times.

Time Magazine Names YouTube Best Invention for 2006.

I don’t think YouTube is an “invention” and it certainly wasn’t the first to market to upload and share videos.

I agree with camcorderinfo that this doesn’t really qualify as an invention.

I was flipping through the dial an stumbled upon the JVC Everio Camcorders on QVC.
It was the Everio GZ-MG27u for $499.

In case you’re not familiar with this unit it doesn’t use tape. It has a 20G hard drive built into the camera. Rather than record in the DV format it records in the MPEG2 format. In the highest quality settings it records at an average bitrate of 8.5 MB/s or about 4.5 hours worth of video.

I know quite a few people with DVD camcorders and they seem to like them. Personally I like the idea of a hard drive model over a DVD camcorder. A DVD camcorder can only record about 20 minutes of video per mini-DVD. It’s not cool to be switching DVD’s when recording dance recitals. Also the hard drive models are much more compact.

The downside of hard drive models is that people will get lazy and keep 2 years worth of videos on the camcorder. What happens in the event of a hard drive failure ??

Most reviewers at Amazon seem to like it. Camcorderinfo.com seems to trash the video quality. I think they sometimes look at products with too much scrutiny.

If this is your first camcorder or your are looking for a basic camera for shooting family memories the JVC Everio Camcorder GZ-MG27 unit will be fine.

Here is a tutorial for downloading videos from Youtube and converting them to a format for Ipod.
You will need to download Super to encode the downloaded video.

If you right click anywhere is Super you can choose the ouput destination of the file.

DVGuru takes a quick poke at Sony Vegas 7. I personally use Vegas Studio. There are certain times when I wish I had a feature that was in regular Vegas.

All of the Vegas products are outstanding. You NEVER read about people having bugs or problems with the software.

In all my research for YouTube in the previous post I decided to create a tutorial for Windows movie maker with all my new found knowledge. I figured since this is a video site I should attempt to create a video tutorial. Here is my first one

Like most people I hate the sound of my recorded voice. Perhaps next time I can hire Don LaFontaine.

I used camtasia to capture the screen and then I edited in Vegas Studio. Creating keyframes to zoom in on the screen was a bit of a hassle.

I would really like to hear some feedback so leave a comment to let me know what you think.

YouTube.com is a widly popular video sharing site. I recently wanted to upload some videos and thought I would share some info I have found.
The maximum size of the video can be 100M. YouTube accepts MPEG, MOV and AVI and I think MP4.

Once you upload the video YouTube reencodes the video into a Macromedia Flash Streaming format(LFV) which is displayed at 425X350. However the actual size of the video is 240X180. This makes the quality suffer a bit.

It seems like you can upload 320X240 or 720X480 and the final quality is not affected either way. I also tried some experiments with MPEG versus MOV and again I could not really see any difference in the final product. I think the sound quality was a little better when I did the initial encoding in MPEG.

I was working on a few home video projects and though it would be cool to create a little montage for each DVD. Let’s face it. Sometimes home movies can be a little boring.

Anyhoo there is a program that cam with my HP PC called muvee autoProducer

It could not be simpler to create a video montage set to your favorite songs. You basically choose a video clip, choose a song and then choose a style. That’s it. In minutes you have a very slick looking montage.

The program comes with with different styles which modify the fades cuts and effects to certain moods. For example they have a “music video style” which is great to create montages with quicj cuts and MTV style effects. They also have more laid back style perfect for everything from wedding to sporting events.

In addition to vidoes you can import still pictures to create very cool picture slide shows. Again Muvee will create all kinds of great effects to really bring still images to life.

You can output your finished Muvee in just about any video format.

This program is a huge timesaver. To create something like this in a regular video editor would take hours.

Click here for a FREE trial of muvee autoProducer