Digital Blue cameras

[pinemarten]

Just wondered - does anyone have any experience of these?

We have 8 each of version 1 and 2 (software mutually incompatible of course so both progs installed on each PC).

 

The software is a bit crap & we really need an alternative - Windows Movie Maker finds the camera when docked , & pulls ' live' video from it ,but will not download recorded clips from it .

 

Any ideas?

[Geoff]

I've found the v2 ones to be reasonably ok. If your doing something more involved I'd suggest you invest in a real video camera with a firewire port and some decent movie editing software (Adobe Premier for example).

[SimpleSi]

These do what their intended for quite well (allow Primary schools to easily make videos and stop-motion animations) but I don't think the visual quality of the camera is good enough for anything else.

 

From memory (I'm not at a school with one at the moment) I think you can export a captured clip to avi format (but maybe only in low quality Indeo 5 format) and then import that into another editor.

 

regards

Simon

[crc-ict]

I think you can export a captured clip to avi format (but maybe only in low quality Indeo 5 format) and then import that into another editor.

 

From my experience with these cameras, I think the low quality is because they have a pretty low capture resolution more than the file format (although SimpleSi is probably correct that it is a low quality format).

 

I guess they do this to keep file sizes down??

 

As an aside, I had a certain amount of difficulty getting them to play nicely with Windows Me machines and wouldn't play at all with our Win 2k Pro oddity.

[Face-Man]

Hi,

 

We've used them for a while (v1) and have just tested some v2. They seem to do exactly what they say on the can.

 

You can definatly capture video and export it as AVI using the software provided though I think it saves in c: drive somewhere. I've had problems with playback in media player 9 but 10 seems fine. I've also used them as webcams and imported from them into Movie maker. As mentioned only really any good for primary level though.