A bit of our life, in words.

I took the certification exam to be a certified PayPal developer and passed! I had been procrastinating taking the test because I wasn’t sure how easy/hard it would be. It was easy to say the least. I almost wish it was harder, but I can’t complain too much. It was disappointing to find out that it will take 2 weeks for me to get anything about being certified. Apparently it’s a manual process once I pass the exam to being added on the certified developers list. That’s about the only benefit other than being able to put that on my resume (and it will sound good to clients also).

I bought the Panasonic HDC-SD1 high-definition camcorder a few weeks ago. 1920 x 1080 pixels of goodness! I’m loving it, and I’ll (eventually) post some example video. It’s a big picture! Looks good on my dad’s true HD TV too!

In fact, I’ll post some video of the military helicopter that came and landed in the park right behind our house on Saturday. It was cool! I have video of it landing and taking off.

I wasn’t too impressed, however, with the narrow field of view that camcorder has; so I bought a wide lens adapter and all is good again. I vaguely remember doing this for my first little JVC Mini-DV camcorder I had years and years ago. It’s a point and shoot video camera, which steps outside how I usually purchase things (feature packed, multi-use products). For example, there’s no external mic input, which would be nice for filming weddings or events… but it’s the best HD camcorder out there right now (trust me, I researched).

3CCD’s (not CMOS), small, VERY lightweight and it records to an SD flash card (no more tape!). Battery lasts over an hour. You can get about 20 minutes of video on a 2 GB Flash card. I quickly found I use that up quick, so I bought a 16GB flash card (only $134 at newegg) and now I can get over 2 hours on one card.

I’m not liking the AVCHD video format it uses too much, since only the Sony Vegas video software can edit the video natively. iMovie and others have to transcode the video (takes 2-3 times longer than the video is, and uses 10x the amount of disk space than the video is) before you can edit it. That should get better with time though. But it still looks great.

I still haven’t thought of a good way to do archival storage of the raw video. I don’t want to use hard drives (sensitive to magnets, drive failure, etc), and I figure if I use DVDs, I’ll quickly have too many to be practical in a year or so. So here’s to hoping HD-DVD or BlueRay burners and media gets cheap, quick!