Download: Posted by slammedpanel at TeacherTube.com.
I posted another video on TeacherTube. I bought a JVC HDD Camcorder for school. Firsly as I wanted a 3CCD lens to get better quality and secondly as I am tired of capturing tape (or remembering which tape is empty or can be overwritten).
I figured students can just drag and drop files into iMovie or Windoze Movie Maker (nice how Vista Movie Maker is not backwards compatible with XP – good one).
This would then save hours of capturing and needing firewire/dv ported machines. Bugger. What I did, and I should know better, was to assume that JVC had actually thought about this too. They haven’t.
The OSX software is rubbish. Not worth the HD space it occupies. The PC apps are equally lame. Why sell a high end consumer device with such hard to use, slow and propriety software?. Web forums are full of posts by people who are confused and frustrated with the JVC.
The problem is the use of Unix based MOD/MOI format files and a USB interface. No playthrough into a MacBook is a drag too.
Renaming the MOD extension to MPEG helps on the PC, but then the audio drops out as thats MPEG2 layer … so unless you are using Media Player 9 and have a bag of codecs, you will find it a pain. Even more so if you are hoping to use it with Movie Maker or something low end like ULead.
It’s just a dumb idea. But not content with that, JVC also decided that the raw footage will be ‘interlaced’. So unless you actually convert the files to another format, say MP4 and have an app that will DEINTERLACE the MOD file then your footage looks shocking, as it’s got interlacing lines through it.
The camera is actually good – though the user interface is off a single nipple type joystick. You have to get to know the GUI to get it to work on any level – which confuses students no end.
The idea was to give a student a JVC and a MacBook and an hour later have a movie in the can. That is not going to happen, the JVC is not a quicker solution.
You have to convert the MOD to something else using a third party application. You also need Quicktime Pro, and also upgrade that (US$29) to deal with MPEG2 layer audio. Nasty, nasty methodology.
The bottom line is this. By the time you’ve dumped you MOD file, ripped it to a format you can use, then imported that into iMovie etc., you are spending as much (if not more time) that you could capturing from tape. The cost price of the JVC is not worth the premium. In future I’ll stick to tape and a 3CCD device.
The most effective solution I’ve found is via a FIRESTORE HDD designed to pull footage from a tape driven camera via a DV port. The firestore saves as quicktime or avi directly. It’s not cheap at about $2k for 80gig … and it’s BIG. It does however speed up the capture process and removes conversion.
Anway, that is the rant over, and I hope that it will assist others in their purchase decisions or solve their conversion issues.
If you are willing to go through the process, the JVC is a good quality machine. It’s just a shame that they did’nt consider the software end of things but just used third party low end stuff to be cheap.
Enjoy the flick on TeacherTube.
Love this rant! You said it all! I’m grappling with the same problem and wish we had some standard solutions to make these things work quickly and efficiently in the classroom. Will have to do more ‘homework’ on this!