We ordered the camcorder. It's a Canon DC100 I think. Paul read lots of reviews and decided it was our best option (reasonable quality, but still affordable).
Then we went for a walk at Lakeside Park. The rose gardens are quite lovely there. We also walked around the neighborhood and admired/critiqued the homes. a couple of them were for sale. We looked at the fliers out of curiosity. The first was about 15 times the cost of our home, the second was only 10 times as much. Paul and I agreed that there was not a house we would ever be willing to spend that much on.
After our walk we headed to the theater to watch Harry Potter 5: The Order of the Phoenix. We went to the afternoon showing a 4:20. The marquee said Harry Pot : 4:20. We were amused, to say the least. We both enjoyed the movie. Paul, having never read the book, had a much different perspective on it. The credits after the movie seemed to be especially boring. We didn't stay through the whole credits though, so it is possible we missed something.
After the movie we drove clear across town to our favorite Chinese place. It was closed, so we drove clear back across town to our second favorite Chinese place. The food was scrumptious. Unfortunately, they seemed to miss the no MSG request. So we both had splitting headaches before the evening was out.
After that, we went to Lowes to attempt once again to order the blinds for our living room. Once again we failed. We were told we needed to come back sometime in the morning. So maybe sometime next week.
...
Tomorrow, I will be taking Sam to Riley for his screening for the drug research program. I'm a little nervous, so pray for me. At least I finally did find someone to watch the other children in the afternoon.
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A very nice day indeed: very relaxing and very fun. I enjoyed the movie, although I had to have Shae explain/clarify a number of things afterward. I got most of it right.
I have very glad that I married Shaelin and she is an excellent wive and mother.
The park walk was fun. That is a very good date park. I believe that the reflecting pool area is rented out to weddings 3 years in advance, which is a long time for a city the size of Fort Wayne. The park is always full of perfectly manicured flowers (lots of roses) and has a copper(II) sulfate colored lake. The interesting thing about the homes is that the more expensive house did not seem nearly as nice as the lesser, at least from the outside. For the record, I may be willing to pay that much in an area of the country where the only thing you can get for that price is a 1 room shack with cardboard walls.
About the camcorder. My decision about cam corders was: this is not a good time to buy a camcorder. The better models store data onto a tape in a digital format that cannot be read by anything except your camcorder. This is highly inconvenient. They are popular because tapes are inexpensive, store lots of data and can be written to quickly allowing for storage of uncompressed high quality video. Most video editing software is geared toward their data format: dv.
There are three other options coming out: micro drives, burns straight to dvd, and flash sd card. Microdrives are a cool idea, but expense to use to store lots of video. I think the idea here is that you use the drive to store the data as you shoot and then move the video to some other medium later (sounds like a lot of work). Straight to dvd is the ultimate for the home video shooter, the only draw back is the mpeg2 compression significantly lowers the video quality. It is moderately expensive media. The flash card is also a cool idea, but writing to a flash card is so slow, the video must be ultra compressed and the quality is about on par with youtube. It seem to me that in the next 5 years, someone is going to come out with a better solution that will catch on. I have trouble seeing tape being the leader of the pack forever. Will flash cards get faster? Will hd dvd burning be fast enough? Will hard drive capacity increase so much that microdrives rule?
Also, in the next few years everything will be going HD. This will instantly obsolete all non-HD recorders while simultaneously skyrocket the price of what is considered by video snobs a "decent" recorder. The price hike will keep the "obsolete" ones more appealing to us home movie makers.
In short, it is better to save your money or to buy a low to middle of the road product and upgrade when it is inevitability obsolete. For the record, still cameras seem to reached more of a plateau right now and are starting to differentiate on bells and whistles. A still camera bought today should be less obsolete in 5 years that one bought 5 years ago would be today.
As a note, several of the reviews said that the straight to dvd method cannot be easily edited. This does not seem to be true. It seems that most tools can import the mpeg2 .vob files to their native format and edited just like any other video. The disadvantage, as I stated earlier, is that the mpeg2 compression hurts the video quality. This is especially true for editing. Blah blah blah key frames blah blah discrete cosine transform blah blah blah.
We decided that we wanted movies of the kids that just can't be caught with stills and medium quality was good enough. The Canon DC100 was certainly not the leader of the pack for features or performance. It is straight to mini dvd (3 in) and has no usb or firewire port. We went with it because, to us it was about as good as others in its class and tiger direct had it 30% off and just barely in the range we would be willing to spend.
If all goes well, it will produce adequate quality and it will be 5-10 years before an HD recorder is practical, at which time we will be ready to upgrade.
Yay parks! Did you see any geese?
I have to ask -- weren't you looking at blinds back in early March when I in Ft. Wayne? Good luck with getting them. I'm sure you won't let blinds declare victory over you.
I hope things go well with your trip to Riley with Sam.
The last time your Dad and I were at Lakeside Park, we got to watch a mother duck and her 9 babies. It was so cool to see her corral them and admonish the two little wanderers. yeah, for moms who still make their little ones mind.
I have been accused of blog-hijacking in the comments section on various blogs, but on this post, Paul, you have proved yourself the al Quaeda to my shoe bomber.
By the way, congratulations to the both of you on your anniversary. I couldn't imagine a better brother-in-law (who else could I discuss board game strategy ad nauseam with?) or cuter nieces and nephews.
I think recording directly to DVD would be a hassle for editing, especially with that loss of quality that you mention. Most convenient would be a camera that stored the data on an internal drive that could be exported by USB to your home computer. Optional storage drives could be available for long trips, but I don't see why they'd need to be different from our current travel drives. Maybe all this is available...
But I'll stop before I have to elevate the alert rating on my comment.
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