15:43
@RoryAlsop I had been talking with him in Photography
and disappeared without mentioning I was going to sleep. I think he was just trying to figure out where I was :)
@jackopen btw, don't be intimidated by "unclear what you are asking" close reasons, you can always edit them to be more clear and get them re-opened (or in the case of a question that is downvoted heavily already, delete it (which will refund the lost rep btw) and ask a new question that is more clear
big sites tend to be less patient with poor English too
where as if we have an idea what you are trying to say, we'll generally try to edit it to fit on smaller sites since the volume of questions is lower and it is actually doable
though sometimes we do still close as unsure what you are asking if we really can't figure out what the question is
but we'll usually start asking in comments to look for more information that can be used to clarify it
@jackopen I'd recommend a camcorder over a P&S for video. still camera's don't really get strong on video until you get to DSLRs
because of what's known as a rolling shutter
the kind of sensors that most still cameras use don't capture the whole picture at once
so they end up producing a jello like effect when you move the cameras left to right
DSLRs have enough other advantages (such as shallow depth of field) that it makes it worth dealing with the rolling shutter (they also have less rolling shutter issues because they tend to scan faster)
Camcorders on the other hand have lower quality sensors (1080p video is only 2 megapixels) but they have a global shutter which captures the entire image at the same time
@RoryAlsop actually, lens on smartphones tend to be very large aperture, but the sensor size is so small and lenses so basic that you don't have any hope of things like depth of field blur and you are severely limited in low light performance
it's not a-typical for a smartphone camera or P&S to go to f/1.6
but they are only covering a few percent of the area of a FF sensor, so it is still very little light
@RoryAlsop CCD would actually be better for video, most phones and point and shoots are CMOS though
@jackopen AVCHD is a form of MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is actually a standards document that defines a number of different types of video formats
h.264 or AVCHD is one of those types specified by the MPEG-4 spec, but there is also a more general MPEG-4 format as well as the m4v/mp4 container format.
but alas, I need to pack up my computer now and head off to the conference I'm working at this weekend
I'll probably be on occasionally, but not as available as I normally am
@jackopen - oh, one last thought for you. Transcoding also depends more on the length of the clips rather than the size
it also depends on how much you are compressing them
for example, last night, I kicked off a job to re-encode about 890mb of source video in to 2.2gb of video in a format that I use for playback at the conference. Even though the size was actually increased, it still took from 3am to about 9:30 am to finish
and that's on my high powered editing tower (2.93 ghz quad core, hyperthreading, radeon 6970 graphics, 12gb high speed ram, striped solid state drive raid array, etc)
