James wonders why there’s such a fuss over digital video formats:

I had been watching you on Ustream since last summer. I was browsing around Youtube and Ustream looking at the videos you made over the past few weeks. After watching your video titled: Digital Camcorder Incompatibilities Insanity, it leaves me with some questions.

In your video, you said camcorder manufactures make there cameras to work on certain formats that may be incompatible with video editing software such as Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere and force you to use whatever software that shipped with the camera. Now I would understand what you said and possibly agree with you when you are talking about digital point and shoot cameras that has video recording capabilities where there is many of them and record in many different formats, but where I don’t understand is camcorders.

Is there not already a general format for a digital video recording in camcorders? Isn’t the standard camcorder format MiniDV recording at AVI-DV? As far as I know, AVI-DV works with all the major video editing software out there. In fact, based on my knowledge it’s the best raw video format to work with.

Now I know MiniDV is standard definition and camcorder manufactures are trying to move consumers into using high def camcorders using miniDV tapes or hard drives. I am not quite sure on this area because I am not in the market for an HD camera as of yet. But based what I know, they record on Mpeg 2 or Mpeg 4 and those formats are terrible to edit.

So what is your say on this? Is AVI-DV the standard camcorder format for standard definition cameras or if not, what would it be? Also, If there is no true standard for HD format recording good for editing and used for rendering, which format would be good as a standard why?

Thank you for taking the time to read my email though I understand you have many to read. I look forward to your response and having a better understanding on what you where trying to say in that video.

Let me put it to you this way: I purchased a digital camcorder that records in AVC-HD, and I’ve yet to be able to use that format because the software (on either Windows or OS X) has yet to become reliable enough. People, inevitably, will want to change one format to another – so I’d rather deal with a more accepted format, and if I know I’m going to compress down to MP4 anyway…

I just record as MPEG-2 if I can – if I even use the digital camcorder at in the first place. Generally, I rely on my digital camera’s video recording feature (good enough for most Web videos these days).

I hate messing with video codecs – I just wanna record or watch video, that’s all.

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