Which should I get for chromakey?

Question

I need a camcorder for chromakey. should I go with a camcorder with CCD3 or an HD camcorder? I heard the cannon HV20 is good. I know panasonic hd camcorders have CCD3 but no firewire output which means that it can't output video. anybody have any suggestions?

Answer 1

old school perfectionists only use live (uncompressed) camera video for the forground (greenscreen) picture. this requires a chromakey video switcher to composite the pictures in real time.  if you are not too picky about the results, computer edited chromakey from compressed video formats can be done.

Answer 2

usually, only tape-based digital vcams (miniDV, digi-8) are equipped w/ DV/ firewire ports... this is so because the pc/app wud have to capture video STREAMS from vcam while tape is on playback... w/c results to a digital video FILE w/c is then saved for edit or whatever.

Whereas for hdd, DVD & flash media vcams, the digital video FILES have already been created in the vcam media and thus will only have to be uploaded...usb is perfect for this.