Refurbished HV20′s For Less than $500!
It has only been a couple of years since WIRED rated the Canon HV20 the best camcorder on the market. In a world suffering from major attention deficit disorder this may the prospective new buyer to overlook this gem, but I can assure you that I am only still just beginning to explore the possibilities as I continue to shoot gorgeous looking 24p video – releasing music videos, short films and even feature lengths that even the pros can’t distinguish from cameras that cost thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars more.
Check out this example of a short film shot exclusively on the Canon VIXIA HV20
Of course it requires some knowledge on the back-end to deliver top-tier content. Lighting, angles, mis-en-scene and color correction can have a huge influence on how the final product will look. But even if you are just shooting quick three minute video clips to post on YouTube, the HV20 will put you miles above the web-cammers.
All of this to say that these days you can pick one up, especially a refurbished model for less than US$500!
Check out this page for the latest prices for the Canon HV20 at Amazon.
Tips on Capturing HV20 Footage to your Vista PC
In windows Vista, the best way to still get the best footage out of your Canon HV20/30 is the method explained at Eugenia’s Rant. Also, I noticed that in Vista at least Premiere Pro CS3 will not properly capture footage from the HV20. Unless yon are using Vegas as outlined below, use HDVsplit. Eugenia explains:
HDVSplit is a popular HDV capture freeware utility. While it generally works OK, unfortunately it occasionally crashes Vegas, because HDVSplit’s captured .m2t scenes erroneously have some black frames at the end of each scene. So, if you will use HDVSplit with anything but Vegas, that’s OK. Otherwise, use Vegas’ own HDV capture facility (which is one big continuous .m2t file for Vegas version 7 or earlier, and with scene detection support, in smaller .m2t files in version 8). Obviously, version 8 is recommended over other Vegas versions for that reason alone. The Pro versions of Vegas 7/8 support scene detection too after you install its official updates from Sony’s site.
Please read her site for excellent articles on the subject of capturing from the HV20/30 into Vegas and other software. Sadly, she will no longer be updating her blog.
I can usually capture quite easily in Vegas although I still think their capture utility leaves much to be desired. I WISH I could capture with Premiere since I like its logging in/out feature for capture – which is the way any decent capture program should work) but no dice with the HV20. At one point I did find a patch for Premiere that was essentially an import template specifically for the Canon HV20/30. A Google search may turn up the most recent location for this small downloadable and very useful file.
This seems to have been corrected and improved in Adobe Premiere CS4 but the verdict is still out.
