So it turns out that that you want to embark on documenting whatever in moving images for the first time, but what is the best camera for you? The answer to such a question can become very long rather quickly, so here I’ll try to give you something to get started.

I am going to assume that you are an individual and not a professional movie maker, and that this may even be the first camera you are buying (if it isn’t – no matter, the advice holds true all the same). You are probably looking for the kind of camera that would be easy to take with you, that is easy to use and that records in a format that is compatible with the various computer programs and television screens of today.

There’e certainly more than one camera that will fit the bill, and what you choose will be largely dependent on the picture quality you desire. For projects shot in low resolution, appropriate for the web for instance, something like one of those new flip video cameras would do the trick. Then Again, if you desire Full HD picture quality with as few compromises as possible, you will probably want to go for a camera recording in the Avchd file format. This means you also need video editing software for avchd, which is now widely available.

Why High Definition?

Allthough everybody talks about high definition these days, you may be surprised to know that it is not a particularly new term. In fact it was used way back in the 1930s when the British 405 line (black and white) TVs where introduced. Their resolution was higher than on the older sets, so thus it was called “high definition”.

Nevertheless, the broad term high defintion can mean many different formats, depending on in what context the term is used.

Basically, high definition television is the height of human television invention, that has surfaced so far. It is completely built around the 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the same as a movie theater screen, that is standard on all new TVs. The resolution is multiplied up to five times from ordinary (SD) resolution, which of course is HD’s biggest selling point. What it really boils down to – high definition is the best available picture on a television. All The Same, there are three different variations of it: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. The latter is the one referred to as “full hd” and is what blu-ray films are recorded in.

The format to work with the avchd video codec, is most of the time 1080i. Even more information about video recording and editing is obtainable here.