Heather, for some time now, has been saying that she wanted us to have a simple video camera to record little parts of our lives.
After some quick research I grabbed an older model Vado HD that was cheap, and looked like it would be easy to use.
It has turned out to be really easy to use, and Heather and I have enjoyed getting to play with it. Last night however, I wanted to actually work with a video we had recorded. When I say work with, I mean I wanted to load the video into an editor and you know… edit it. I am not an expert with video editing tools, but that is a post for another day. What I discovered is that the codec (Video Encoding) was some goofy custom thing that none of the editing tools I had access to could work with. To make things worse, none of the variety of video conversion tools I had were able to convert it to a more palatable format.
After a few hours of grief, I think the secret was to install the video editing package that came with the camera, and somehow that dropped a second “edit mode” codec into the registry, letting STOIK open the video to re-sample it. I should not that I still cannot open the native off-the camera video in an editor. Being able to open the video with STOIK means I don’t really care, I just have to convert to an edit-friendly format before starting work.
I would like to be angry at Creative Labs for picking such a weird, unsupported codec for their camera, however I am painfully aware how complicated the job of a codec can be. Complicated means expensive in this case, all the nice easy-to-use codecs are not cheap, and must be licensed. I feel like by buying a cheaper camera I kind of asked to deal with this mess.
On the bright side, I have a workable system to convert video to something I can use. Probably not much chance Heather can do it solo, but she has no problem using the camera. I can live with having to do the imports myself.
-Jordan
Nelsons 