Canon HV20

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Judy,
If you find out anything that might be of interest to others please post it here

[Clayton]

The February 2008 edition of Videomaker has named the Cannon HV20 as the best consumer camcorder of the year.

[Chuck Engels]

Some great information copied from a post by Jack Falbey, Thanks Jack

I've only been playing with my HV20 for a little while, but I can offer some suggestions to get you started...

1) Set the power switch to CAMERA, press the FUNC button to bring upthe options. At the top left, there's an icon that lets you select various shooting profiles. There's one called CINE MODE that gives very nice image results out of the box. It takes care of many of the manually-adjustable settings for you, and looks prettty good too. I recommend shooting in CINE MODE at first.

2) Use the joystick to move down the left column to the MENU icon, then press the joystick in. This gives you options to set most of the camera's features. Move down 1 icon to the REC/IN SETUP, move right and set HD STANDARD to HDV (not HDV PF24). This will record the highest-quality HD video that the camera is capable of.

3) Switch the camera to PLAY. Press the FUNC button and move down to the MENU icon and press the joystick in. Move down 2 icons to PLAY/OUT SETUP2 and set DV OUTPUT to DV LOCKED. This will downconvert the HDV to standard DV right in the camera when capturing in PE4.

You will now be recording beautiful HDV 1440x1080i video and capturing in SD 720x480 NTSC. The advantage here is that HDV downconverted looks way better than recording in regular DV, and the tapes will still have the full HDV video on them if you want to use it in an HD project the future!

[George Tyndall]

For all you considering the Canon HV20 cam here is a good forum that goes into detail about using the 24p mode on it. Looks interesting.

http://www.hv20.com/

Thanks for sharing, Don.