[unirdna]

Thanks Swede.

All photos AND video were captured with my Canon S80. No wide-angle lenses or any other bells or whistles - camera and case, that's it. Just got the toy before the trip. Connor and I agreed that having a camera is absolutely necessary for non-hunting trips. Without the thrill/goal of a hunt, you need a substitute.....so, you "hunt" for better photos and vid. You also use the camera to remind yourself of all the fish you could have killed (and man would I have liked to plug those stupid hogfish - I was getting hungry filming them).

The video is very large - at least, at the quality I like to capture (640x480 30fps). Camera takes Secure Digital (SD) cards, and the largest size currently available is 4GB. I had two, and filled them both. I can get about 35 min of video per 4gb card. Good thing is that the camera allows you to crop/edit the vids - very important since space is at a premium.

The post editing was done entirely on windows moviemaker. If you are running XP, you already have this. I've used other programs (Ulead, Adobe, Pinnacle, Cyberhome), but wasn't impressed. Those "flashier" programs simply come with more hoaky transitions. I hate that crap. Who in the hell wants to use a "starwipe"??? Anyway, I prefer fades and blends, and movie maker does a surprisingly good job at that with a relatively quick learning curve - it's made by MS, afterall. I wish it could do zoom and pan on photos, but it's pretty solid considering it's bundled "free" with XP. I encode with a very high quality bitrate. Because most of the screen is blue, the video size doesn't get too large. And to give MS it's fair shake, windows media video (.wmv) is a pretty solid codec (stands for "compression/decompression"). Only Mpeg4 (DVD), DivX or Xvid is better. WMV is solid for sending stuff around the web, and even decent for playback on a TV.

I don't lose all that much quality by encoding (if I use a high bitrate). You see colors blend a bit, and freezing a frame isn't as clear. The camera captures video in "motion .jpeg". This basically means that the camera takes 30, 640x480 photos every second (with audio). Thus, you can pluck any one of those frames out and use it as a photo. It also has a setting that captures in 1028x768, 15fps. This mode is a little choppier, but the photos are good enough to print on a 4x6. Basically, the ultimate "rapid fire" mode.