On Monday 20 March 2006 18:28, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote: >I'm shopping for new camcorder and am considering getting a "shotgun" >mic for it. I wondered if anyone here has any experience with these. > I'm looking at the Rode VideoMic: >http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/VideoMic/ That looks A: like a pretty decent mic for the bucks, but be aware that the AUD vs USD will eat a lot of that so-called discount. And B: an odd shock mount which leads me to ask how fragile in might be in the field as it sure looks top heavy and the photo doesn't seem to show much bracing in the roll direction. I like that spl rating of 131 db though, you are not going to be able to overload that mic without wearing some 30db gun muffs like I use at the target range. >I've pretty much settled on the Panasonic PV-GS300 camcorder. Any >experiences or opinions on that are also welcome. No experience there, other than to comment that I have a Sony TRV-460 digital hi8 that I'm plumb in love with. I shot a wedding with it last spring that came out very well. It has a firewire port so I can upload raw video in real time, but that needs lots of free space on your hard drive for half an hour. That 20 minute wedding was over 3.8GB IIRC. But kino had no problems editing out my shakes. And the resultant videocd I burned several copies of smunched that down to about 340 megs with no visible loss of quality that I could see, and it played in everybodies cd readers as far as I know, in addition in my own dvd player, an el-cheapo Apex. >Also, is there any such thing as a linux-video-users list where this >might be more on-topic? I remember seeing a linux-video-developers > list in someone's sig here or on lad, but can't recall the URL and > didn't know if a video-user's question would be on-topic for that > list anyway. Well, there is the video4linux list, but its rather hardware/software drivers for the hardware centric with little of the video artistic crowd around. Personally I feel its more on topic on this list than that one, but thats just me being practical. "Here be the artists" IMNSHO, and thats meant as a complement to this crowd. As an opinionated, experienced old engineer, they 'tolerate' me for the most part :) >Thanks, >ERic Rz. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.