Ag-hmc40 - 6 Star Price, 5 Star Quality, 4 Star Controls
By Josh
This AG-HMC40 is compact, which is a good thing for most applications. It can pretend to be a consumer camera because of it's size. Slapping on a directional shotgun mic really improves audio performance, so no need for the XLR adapter unless you are planning on plugging into advanced audio equipment.
Here's the good. Nice optical zoom, nice view finder and foldout viewer. Video files look very good, you can really tell this is a 3cmos camera. Audio quality from the shotgun mic I slapped on (not an XLR, no need because the cord is short and won't act like a huge antenna) is very good, while the built in is passable. Files are very easy to work with, however see my tip at the bottom. It's really cheap for a 3cmos, making it tempting as a starter camera for new videographers, and as an extra camera for those looking to expand their hardware on a budget. Class 6 is the fastest SD card you will need, no need to go higher, the camera doesn't push out any more bits than what a class 6 should handle, I find I get pretty good millage with a pair of 16 GB cards.
Here's the OK. It's tricky to do a smooth zoom with this camera. I believe you can change the setting to have the ring control the zoom which might help, but still might be awkward if your hand gets in front of the viewfinder somehow. Lots of control options for balancing color, and how open the iris is. Autofocus is maybe OK, if filming a non-depth moving target, or even a stage from a distance, do yourself a favor and turn the auto-zoom off. Brightness levels are hard to discern as well. The viewer may make it seem not as bright as it is, so be careful how far you adjust the iris settings, or you'll end up with video that is washed out because too much light was let in.
The flip side is the 1/4 CMOS is not the biggest, and low light may end up a little grainy, but I still think it does just fine with the proper settings. If the light gets just too low, you're in trouble almost regardless of the camera, so maybe get some lights? Only other semi-gripe is that there is only 1 SD card slot, but with how long each card can go, you'll be hard pressed to find an event where you can't get a 'tape' change in, you'll probably be needing a break as well at that point.
I really don't have much in the way of 'bad' to say about this camera. As far as I can tell it's just a compact camera that performs at/nearly a professional level. I find the size/price it's greatest assets.
For post processing the best advice I can offer is to take the files off of the fat32 formatted SD cards, and get them (if you're using windows) onto an NTFS drive. Then take all the mts files and merge them into one file. The easiest way by far is to open up a terminal, cd to where the MTS files are and
copy /b .*MTS .OutputFile.MTS
(this command will combine all files ending in MTS and put them into one file called OutputFile.MTS, which you can obviously change the name to whichever suits you)
The reason for doing this is that all the video editing software I have tried did not properly get the audio for the end of each MTS file, and you have audio gaps and video stutter (about 1 second at the end of each MTS file). I should point out this only happens when files exceed the 4GB Limit of the FAT32 file system. There are tools and such to combine files, but just shoving all the bits together is all they do anyway, and a copy command can handle this nicely. I've heard a couple editors will do this seamlessly, but not any I have. Took me over 2 hours to figure the copy trick out, hopefully I'll save someone some time.
If I had the option of giving it a 4.6 out of 5 I would, but I'll just have to round up and give it 5 stars.
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by: John Adam