HD Video on a Mac at Consumer Prices

I've been watching the camcorder market for a couple of years, waiting for "the right time to buy". I'm also a Macintosh user so want to be sure the camera I choose works with my system. With very few exceptions, this seems to be a slam dunk. iMovie, part of Apple's suite of consumer-level content creation tools in iLife '09, has native support for all the major standards such as ADVHC for high definition video as well as DV and other standard definition video formats. But frankly I'm the type of PC user who knows enough to be dangerous, and iMovie is a little too restrictive for me. Don't get me wrong, it's simple and intuitive -- very easy to piece together some clips taken throughout the day or over a week's vacation and make a good-looking DVD out of it -- but I find most of the transitions and effects too limited.

Enter Final Cut Express 4, a scaled-down version of Apple's popular professional level Final Cut Studio. Studio retails for over $1,000 US while Express can be had for under $200, and you can usually find it for a bit less for instance if you buy it from Apple when purchase a new Mac I think they give you $20 off. There are different bundled apps including in Studio, which we mere mortals probably wouldn't know what to do with anyway, but the functionality of Final Cut itself, as a video editor, is the same. This means professional level editing is available at more-or-less consumer prices. Add to that Final Cut Express' support for ADVHC and even HDV, a competing high-definition standard normally found in higher-end cameras, and Final Cut Express becomes an all around terrific tool for the "prosumer" market.

So once you know the editor you'll be using, how do you get high definition video onto your Mac to edit? There are planty of options here. Everything from sub-$200 flash memory based, hand-held digital camcorders from the likes of Kodak, RCA and Pure Digital up to those professional cameras costing tens of thousands of dollars. I'm settlng on the Sanyo VPC-FH1 HD 1080p Flash Memory Camcorder, which is a full high definition camcorder which records at up to 1920x1080p (1080p) and anything below but costs under $450 at retail. I've read all the reviews I can find to be sure about the camera itself and how its file format works with the Mac. Everything seems to be thumbs-up save for some complaints about the lack of a working image stabilizer, so if you plan to "walk and shoot" you may need to rig one of those DIY $14 steadycams, which is precisely what I plan to do.

Now, I happened to buy Final Cut Express at a time when it was on sale for $149 (it was a really good sale). With the camcorder hanging around $420 at Amazon (I haven't found it anywhere else yet in the US) and a $14 DIY steadycam, my total is $583. You could easily spend that much just for a good standard definition camcorder and not get the advantages inherent in HD, and believe me if you read the detailed review, and watch the sample video, at cancorderinfo.com you'll see this little sub-$500 HD camcorder has a lot going for it. This is the purchase I am planning to make.