one monkey typing

The new camcorder has something in common with all my other camcorders; the lens doesn't go wide enough. Luckily I stopped by Meijer before we left and I picked up a Targus wide+tele add-on lens set. The tele is 2x but I just left that at home. The wide is 0.45X, and honestly I left it on the camera about 80% of the time.

With the wide adapter on, the widest zoom on the camera is just about right for taking typical shots like inside hotel rooms and other inside spaces, and wide shots of typical open spaces. We were at the Kennedy Space Center visitor's center a couple of days ago and a few other places, and without the wide adaptor, it wouldn't have been nearly as good.

Even shooting into the Florida sun, there was little lens flare. The coatings seem pretty good. And there wasn't really much extra distortion at all.

$30 at Meijer for both lenses. Native 37mm which is what my camcorder uses so it looks pretty natural on mine. It's an aluminum body, nice looking construction and even has filter rings on the front of it. It also comes with 4 or 5 adapter rings for different filter sizes. The wide is actually 2 parts, if you remove the front part, the remaining part is a macro adapter, though with any camera I've had recently that's unnecessary; they'll all focus to about 1cm anyway.

Recommended.

I got the video editing software in today. I neglected to check the system requirements before ordering. I figured I had already played around with it on my machine (pirated copy) so I'd be OK.

Turns out that for editing AVCHD streams, which is what my camcorder produces, they REQUIRE (not "recommend") 2GB of RAM. My machine is a bit older and has 1G. Luckily RAM is dirt cheap these days, and I have a paypal balance from some ebay'in that covered the whole tab. I grabbed 2x1GB of DDR400 since I have two open slots. That puts me at 3GB which should be plenty. I picked "slow and free" for shipping method, but that's OK since there's no way I'd get it this weekend anyway.

My CPU is a bit weak, it's an AMD x64 single core 2.2 GHz (which they call a 3500+). It should do OK.

I've been trying to clear disk space. When I get to editing video in earnest, I'll probably pick up a dedicated 1TB external (plus a backup), but I'll leave that until probably after Christmas. I've already gotten too many new things lately. What I'd like to do is to transfer all the old format video to a hard drive; I have a bunch of Hi8 and a bunch of MiniDV, and a way to play both for now. I'd hate to get to a point 10 years from now when my Hi8 camcorder dies and I can't lay hands on another one to get that content off the tapes.