"The autofocus is sometimes is more trouble than it's worth. Not the fault of the camera — you can shoot manually if you want to — but this reminds me why we pay through our noses for expensive gadgets. A £300++ camcorder will not give you the control you need to narrate the story"
Thumbs up: Its strength is the pocketability factor. This JVC Everio model is very light and fits in your palm comfortably. Instant playback on its “large” CCD enables me to see what I shoot, and delete the rubbish footage and do another take.
If you’re taking this baby for an all-day stroll in a foreign city, recharge the battery well. It should last between seven hours 10 minutes to 37.5 hours, depending on the type of recording. You can use an SD card to keep the footage, but thankfully, GZ-MG334HEQ comes with a 30GB hard disk drive. So no more “argh, I forgot the card” moments of panic and anguish.
It also comes with the options of 35x optical zoom and 800x digital zoom. But like many pros and semi-pros would tell you, with a cheap camcorder like this, forget the zooming. Walk closer to your subject instead and shoot as many castaway shots as possible in wide angle and close-up for a less cheesy, and less shaky, narration.
The Direct DVD button looks handy, but I didn't use this feature. You don’t need this if you play a lot with Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier.
Thumbs down: You need a steady hand. If you don’t have a tripod or a monopod, then do not tremble. It’s light, so your arm won’t tremble so much from holding the same position for 40 minutes.
The autofocus is sometimes is more trouble than it's worth. Not the fault of the camera – you can shoot manually if you want to – but this reminds me why we pay through our noses for expensive gadgets. A £300++ camcorder will not give you the control you need to narrate the story. It is meant for the amateur who relies on presets. I am quite frustrated by its inability to focus quickly especially when you move the lens rapidly from a brightly lit space to a badly lit space.
Some features have to be sacrificed to make way for ‘pocketability’, one of them being a large-sized CCD. The size of the monitor is ok for the simple menu it offers. But once you fill up the camcorder with, say, 60 video clips, it’s hell to flick back and forth, or up and down, the menu lists to find a particular clip. The touch screen feature may help a bit, but like many iPhone users would tell you, sometimes even that isn’t good enough.
The video format is mpeg4. Of course, it doesn’t look like that when you import the damn thing into your iMac. Not even Final Cut Pro is able to recognise this format.
I used the roundabout way of opening it up in MPEG Streamclip freeware – only to discover that MPEG Streamclip wouldn’t convert the footage to .mov unless I fork out US$19 for a QuickTime extension. Which I did.
And this model is noisy! I had to shoot a 40-min long footage of a group of dancing dervishes – it was meant to be a very solemn and quiet affair – and each time I switched the Everio on and off, it made a beeping noise which annoyed everyone sitting around me. The lens cover had to be slid open and shut. The scraping sound of this action ended up in the footage, too.
Would I recommend it to my mates? Yes, as an ancillary visual recording tool to support your still or moving photography.
Sure, you can shoot your whole project with this baby (I did) but you soon realise that unless you have the opportunity to shoot everything in broad daylight, you're just going to have to edit the footage to death in your video editor.
In my case, it was pissing down with rain and hail all the time I was in Istanbul, and the train station waiting room where the dancing dervishes were shot was dark. My only source of lighting was the chandelier hanging above (two light bulbs blown). Oh yes, I played with framing a lot just to compensate.
But hey, the GZ-MG334HEQ is cheap, light, unobtrusive and if you break it, you won’t cry.
