Interamericana

The Project

I recently purchased a Sanyo Xacti WH1 digital camcorder for my upcoming trip to Central America. The idea is to produce short films and mini-documentaries on the road.

The above footage was shot in Bushy Park, southwest London, and knocked together using Power Director 8. This was my first attempt at making a short film, and as such, an experimental venture. There’s much to learn and a long way to go, but I hope I’ve captured something of the park’s tranquil quality here.

Note that videos viewed straight from Youtube’s website are always smoother, cleaner and crisper than those embedded elsewhere. Please click inside the video to go to Youtube.

The Camcorder

On the whole I am satisfied with my purchase. The image quality is not exactly superb, but decent enough for the internet, which is not yet fast enough to support picture-perfect video anyway.

Colours and detail are fair to excellent in natural light, which will be a boon in the fierce sunlight of the tropics. Macro shots, exemplified by the butterfly drinking from the flower, are quite impressive too. Quality is technically HD at 720p, but you can get better for your money if high definition is what you’re after.

My main reason for buying the Sanyo WH1 is its waterproof capability. Resistant to a depth of 3m, I will be able to safely take it to the coral reefs and waterways of Central America. It’s also small, lightweight and robust – the perfect travelling companion, or so I hope.

Now some downsides. The Sanyo WH1 performs poorly in artificial light, producing very grainy images. There is also significant loss of detail on high zoom, with some purple fringing along the edges of objects. The built-in still camera is laughable (2MP), but I’ll be using a proper DSLR for still photography in any case.

The Challenge

Technology is a two-edged sword. On one hand, it opens dazzling new creative avenues. On the other, it constrains the whole creative process. The biggest challenge I face is working with poor man’s technology that lags far behind my creative needs.

My travelling laptop is an Advent 4211, which is a generic MSI wind. This is a small, lightweight netbook with a small, but reasonably feisty, Intel Atom processor. The processor copes well with basic word processing, internet browsing and even image manipulation, but it struggles with high-powered tasks like video editing.

On high definition mode, the Sanyo WH1 outputs MP4 files. Playback on my Advent is painful and choppy, with editing forever an impossibility.

To enable editing, I must convert all footage to a more palatable format, stripping out at least 50% of the quality. This is a time-consuming task. During the making of the above short film, an hour of footage took 5-6 hours to convert. Even after that, my chosen editing suite, Adobe Premiere Pro, refused to process it smoothly. I was forced to use the much more basic Power Director 8.

Editing in Power Director 8 was only barely acceptable. After installing another Gigabyte of RAM and setting the process priority to realtime, I could just, only just, splice together the footage. In future it may be necessary to strip out even more quality to enable totally smooth, pin-point precise editing, which I could not on this occasion.

I face another major constraint at the upload stage. Youtube now supports video files of 2GB, which is great for those of us with high speed connections. Unfortunately, I will soon be relying on Third World speeds and internet cafés, meaning I’ll have to compress a 2GB file to 200-300MB max if I hope to upload my files in any reasonable time. Once again, quality suffers in the face of limited technology.

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