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Vacations are why a lot of people buy camcorders, so it's perhaps appropriate that I'm writing this column while on holiday. I've been jetting around Europe for the past couple of weeks on a trip for both business and pleasure, and I of course wanted to take a camcorder along. But the downside of this trip was that my wife was unable to come with me. So I decided to take some videos, and post them on a Web site so she could see some of what I've seen on my trip and accompany me in a virtual way. Here's how I did it.

A Nice Little Camcorder

The first thing I needed was a camcorder. I could have taken my Sony MiniDV camcorder, but Sanyo had just come out with the VPC-HD1A, so I decided to try that instead. This rather nice little camcorder shoots 720p high-def video to SD Cards, so there's no fiddling around with videotapes. I was impressed with this 9-ounce model; though its image quality isn't as good as that of an HDV camcorder, it is very small and light, and was easy to shoot with. My only major complaint concerned the location of the microphone: It's on the back of the screen, so you can't shoot a video of yourself talking and see what you're shooting at the same time. Instead, you must frame the shot, and then flip the screen around so that the microphone faces you before you can record the video. The high-def video also takes up a lot of room--a 2GB SD Card held only about 40 minutes. So you'll need several cards if you're shooting a lot.

That wasn't a big problem for me, though. I had brought my laptop, so every night I removed the SD Card from the camcorder, popped it into my laptop, and copied the video off of it, freeing up the space for the next day. I didn't carry the laptop around with me all the time, but I didn't venture too far from a power socket, so I could copy the video off each night. The memory card's limited capacity wasn't much of an issue. Besides, a 2GB SD Card will cost you less than $50.

Editing Software

Next, I edited the video. I had initially planned to do this in Premiere Pro on my laptop, but it couldn't import the HD1A's MPEG-4 video without additional software. Fortunately, I had a copy of Ulead's VideoStudio 10 also installed, which imported the video without problem. The moral of this story? Test your equipment and software before you set out.

A bit of editing later, I had a video of what I had done that day. My laptop is not particularly fast, which made editing awkward. As a result, the playback of the high-definition MPEG-4 video was rather jerky, so I didn't get a great view of the edited video before I rendered it. But all I needed to do was perform some basic trimming and add a few titles, and my laptop could handle that.

I then saved the video to the hard drive, and converted it to the DivX format using the free Dr.DivX video converter. Next I uploaded the video file to my Web site via FTP and created a Web page that shows the video using the DivX HTML code generator. DivX compresses the video a lot, but the files are still quite large--an 11-minute video ending up at about 640MB. That's way too big to upload over a dial-up connection, but the places I visited all had broadband connections, so I just left them uploading while I had dinner. An amazing number of places offer Internet access on the road: directories like JIWire and WiFi411 list wireless access points all over the world. And a quick bit of video editing is a good way to while away the hours waiting in airports. I could then e-mail my wife and let her know that there was a new video to watch.

I used DivX because it does a good job of balancing file size with image quality. The program produces compressed videos that look and sound good, and don't take an age to download. The only downside of this is that the person viewing the video has to install the DivX Web player software, but that's not hard to do.

The whole process worked pretty well, and could be done with most camcorders. You could shoot the video with a standard MiniDV camcorder, and then use any laptop with a FireWire port, Internet access, and a reasonably sized hard disk to import, edit, and upload the video. I didn't have to carry around a lot of stuff to do it (all I needed was the camcorder, a laptop and a couple of cables). My wife got to see the places and family members I was visiting. It's not the same as having her along on my trip, but at least she got a taste of the places I visited. Now if I can just remember where I left my passport...

Richard Baguley is not completely sure which country he's in right now. But e-mail him and he will get your message. He blogs about camcorders and video at CamcorderInfo.com.