Alright, as I already posted in the "New Toys" thread, I bought this a couple of days ago:
And I made a first test video in my lunch break on Thursday. The fact that I've loaded it up just now is thanks to the fact, that I had to figure out re-encoding and keeping the quality throughout the process first - which is not as easy, as I thought. The camera records in MP4 format but my (not entirely up-to-date) editing software cannot handle that right. So I had to re-convert into DIVX first, which produced the problem, that somehow the audio track got lost. No idea why.
I ended up with mixing together two video streams -- one with the original sound but crappy picture and one with no sound but 16:9 HD picture -- and faded the bad one out.
Then I wanted to export the whole project and found out, that WMV format isn't good enough, no matter how high you set the quality of the re-encoding. Quality of the result really sucked (contours shaking, stair effect on white lines on the road, the lot).
So I ended up converting the whole thing into a Quicktime movie, which I then uploaded to Vimeo. And here you are, my first HD video test:
First half the sun is behind me and on the way back I drive right into the sun. I squeezed the camera between backrest and headrest of the passenger seat, which is definitely too low and the autofocus became confused a bit by that at times. Also it's a very shaky place and the camera cannot compensate for all the vibration. Have to find another mounting solution, will probably use my tripod and fix it with strings. There is a potential carbage moment at 4:25...
I'm quite fascinated by the quality in daylight so far and am looking forward to making some more vids this weekend. I like the fact, that I can now record for 2 hours straight (That's about how long the battery holds) without the camera atomatically shutting down after 10 minutes. That enables me to make videos of longer trips and cutting them to pieces much easier, than before.
I hope you won't be bothered to see again some of the things you already know -- but now in HD