I’ve been through many camcorders on my channel so far. The FS100 has provided many great videos but I felt the step up to HD was necessary and I plunged for the Kodak Zx1 pocket HD Camcorder. This was amazing however was limited by its main selling point -- being compact. So I’ve decided to go for the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 and go up another gear. Lets hope it works out!
As I’ve come to notice over the past couple of months, the audio quality from my Canon FS100 is not really good enough when I’m all the way over the other side of the room. For this reason I sought after an external mic, now I could have gone two ways: either get a USB one and have to mix the audio and video together in Final Cut in post production or get one with a 3.5mm connection and plug it directly into my camcorder. The advantage of my FS100 is that unlike most camcorders it features a mic jack so I chose the latter option as this would require less work and be just like I normally record them.
I picked up a SkyTronic Stereo Condenser Microphone for just under £20, which included a small and mini mic stand as well as two audio cables. A 0.5m coiled one and a 3m longer one each with a 3.5mm audio jack on the end to plug into my camcorder. Now you could say I should have gone down and bought a cheap headset one from the local store but for some reason any microphone I use with the Canon FS100 requires itself to be externally battery powered. So my SkyTronic runs on one AA battery and I have plenty of those and they’re cheapish compared to the smaller AAA.
Then I was all ready to go and after plugging it in I saw the directional mic work really well. When connected to the camcorder, it obviously turns off the internal mic and only uses the external version, I like how it will be directed towards my desk and no longer will it pick up random noises from across the room. The build quality isn’t bad and it feels sturdy enough but it’s pretty lightweight at 110g and I feel I could break it if it hit a hard surface. Better be careful! On the other hand the quality is exactly what I wanted, no more echo and it’s much better attuned to vocals which I’ll be using it for.
So it will definitly be an improvement over the inbuilt camcorder mic and although it isn’t a world class expensive acoustic quality microphone it will do the job for now. If you’ve watched the video you’ll understand how much trouble I had but suffice to say I have finally set it up and secured it properly. You’ll see in the next video how it is and how much of a difference it makes to the quality of the audio feed.
With all these flash based card devices around nowadays most home consumer level computers are coming with multi-card readers built in. Some new laptops are gaining this luxury, although it is something Apple has chosen to omit from it’s Macbook notebook range, and not knowing when I’ll be upgrading in the future I thought I’d get a USB reader as I bide my time. Now I didn’t want a fully fledged, steel cased, multi-card, indestructible one as some seem to be but just an SD HC reader for my camcorder specifically. After seeing the wide range on the internet I turned to my old friend eBay. Now I thought the days of bargains were over on the auction site with a saturated user base however I managed to pick up exactly what I wanted for just 3p – Yes that includes postage from Hong Kong. Bargain – job done.
The downside is I’ve had to wait 9 days to receive it but it has eventually got here, true to the word of the eBay seller. It supports SD HC cards, which was my key requirement, and also matches the silver scheme of my Powerbook and other office equipment. Theres not much too say really about it’s process but the first time I plugged it in I did hit a bit of a hiccup. From my experience you have to have the SD card plugged into the USB device before you plug it into your computer. Not only does it work perfectly but it can also help not to corrupt the card although I am not too sure on the latter. Surely it is safer and recommended to do this and obviously to eject the USB device before you unplug your SD card.
Well I’m chuffed with a device that works at such a low low price and I’ll be using it quite often because it saves all the trouble with power cables and USB cables on my camcorder. All I have to do now is take out the removable storage and plug it into this little reader. Simple…It makes me wish all life was.
Yes so many of you know I just bought a Canon FS100 Camcorder and with many electronics moving towards flash or non moving parts media I thought I should expand mine. Now SD cards have been around for years but the new version (2.0 you could say) is the SD HC (High Capacity) cards and they can have larger storage; the biggest so far at 32gb.
Now this is where some confusion arises -- SD and SD HC cards are not entirely compatible with everything. For instance an SD card reader may not work with an SD HC card unless it specifies and these problems are hard to see. The confusion starts because they look the same but they work slightly differently with different device firmware to get that extra space on the card. I hope the manufacturers start to make it clearer on the packaging but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Regarding hardware and card readers it seems the market was a bit slow on picking up SDHC support. At the moment I know of only one reputable internal SDHC card reader and that is the PEAK All in One Reader which I could only find on eBay here but also google it to check. I’ve heard some good reviews from it but if you’re not wanting to fiddle inside your pc, or have a laptop (I’ll answer to both of those) then a usb card reader may be easier. Now there are tons of these on the market including SDHC compatible ones so be careful to choose the right one, but for your money the Sandisk MicroMate USB card reader looks good as well as the Integral SD reader. I’ll be buying one in the next couple of days and I’ll let you know what happens as it’ll be a lot easier this way with my camcorder not having to plug the beast into the usb every single upload.
Anyway I checked the internet a month ago and saw this 32gb SD HC card come out mid-August for £59.99. Yes you read that right -- £59.99 and thats a lot of money for such little memory nowadays when I could buy a 750gb External Hard Drive for the same amount. However the beauty, and large cost, comes from the fact it’s so small and there is no difference in size of a 1gb SD card to a 32gb SD HC card. With this installed in my camcorder I can get 7 hours and 13 mins of footage! Now that is amazing on such a little card! That’s amazing really and it seems larger cards are on their way soon as with all the sectors used on an SD -HC card we could see memory of 2048 GB! I can imagine next year this same card will be about £29.99 if that with electronic prices dropping so much in the past few years…oh well I can say I had one first.
So I got my new camcorder the Canon FS100 last week and I posted up a review a couple of days ago, you should check it out. Now the footage is captured in an obscure format being .mod with not many Operating Systems or software packages reading it natively. As a mainly Mac user (especially for video) I struggled to find a way to make these non working .mod files open up in my Final Cut Express editing suite. As pointed out by Rob in the comments below if you have the latest version of iMovie 8 then you can import your videos straight from the camcorder and no conversion is required. So if you cannot be bothered at all with all the information below you could just upgrade to iMovie 8 if your Mac supports it. I have also included a brief Windows guide but bear in mind this is if you’re not using the supplied software. Finally after hours of searching and scaling the world wide web I have put together this guide so basically you don’t have to.
Mac OS X Guide
First of all let me warn you, this may cost you money -- not much mind you but unless you have Final Cut Pro you probably won’t have an Mpeg 2 Playback Component installed on your Mac. An easy way to check is to right click on the .mod file and click “get info.” Then further down rename the file with the extension .mpg -- so MOV001.mod would become MOV001.mpg. With the file renamed open it up in Quicktime, if it works you have the component installed, if it doesn’t it means you need to buy it. After you have checked this it would be a good idea to rename the movie file .mod to not cause any confusion.
So you need the Mpeg 2 Component? Well you need to buy it and download it from Apple’s web site http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/ For US fans it will cost $20 and for the Brits over here it costs £15. Why we have to pay more for the same digital download is beyond me. Anyway follow the process and once that’s complete we can go onto the next step.
Now all we need to do is actually convert the file into something video editors like iMovie and Final Cut will read. By far the best software I’ve tried is Mpeg Streamclip and yes it comes at no cost. Download the software from Squared 5 at http://www.squared5.com/ Now what I love about this software most, is its ability to offer countless options of formats but also that it keeps the quality at the best possible. I can’t stand it when I have a nice looking section of video but then have to convert it only to make it look like something from a pinhole camera. When you have opened the video in Streamclip, go to file, export to quicktime and then choose compression of Apple DV -- PAL and drag the quality up to 100%. These are the settings I have used for my sample videos which you can see on the Canon FS100 review blog post. I also change the framesize to “1024 x 576″ (16:9) as I shoot in widescreen with my camcorder and this may be different with yours. The only downside to this method is there is no batch conversion so if you have a lot of video clips it will take some time to convert all the clips. DropDV is an alternate converter with a batch conversion however it seriously degrades the quality and blurs the pixels so I would advise against using it.
There it is! The files are now in the right format and (with sound) will work in Mac video editing software like iMovie or Final Cut.
Windows XP/Vista Guide
The good thing about Vista is (my Home Premium at least) that it can read .mod files out of the box in windows media player but only if you use a card reader as for some reason if I copied it through USB the computer couldn’t read them. It might be different with you but I know it will definitely work this way at least. Once your computer can read them; Windows Movie Maker will edit them seamlessly and you can make your video. Quite simple. However if you’re using a different video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas you need to do some more work unfortunately.
For Windows XP/VIsta I have a solution from arthur sixpence which he commented below involving SDcopy, a tricky program to track down either google it or download a version here, it very simply changes the extension from .mod to .mpg but also sets the constraints for the wide screen format correctly for video editing software to read them. He has already tried it successfully with my .MOD clips from the Canon FS100 review in Adobe Premiere and I believe it should work with other suites like Sony Vegas. If it works for you feel free to comment below and let us know.
If you have tried the SDcopy method described above and it does not work then the other option is to convert the file and I think the best option is again to use Mpeg Streamclip. Follow the instructions as above with the Mac version as the software is very similar but read these following changes first though:
For Mpeg Streamclip to read the file you must rename the video file .mpg
Then when you open it in Streamclip,like Mac OS X, it will ask you for the Mpeg 2 Component. But if you follow the instructions given you can use a free alternative or pay for the one from Apple.
Once the Mpeg 2 Component is installed the video will work however instead of converting to quicktime it would be better to convert to something more windows friendly like avi.
Hopefully these converted AVIs will then work in Vegas or other video editing software with minimal quality loss. Let us know how you get on or if you have a better method by commenting below and help the community get on top of these .MOD problems.
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March 3rd, 2010 
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Regarding hardware and card readers it seems the market was a bit slow on picking up SDHC support. At the moment I know of only one reputable internal SDHC card reader and that is the PEAK All in One Reader which I could only find on eBay 
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