The Weekend of Failed Video Cameras

What a crazy weekend of trying to shoot some video. It seemed (almost) like every video camera I touched failed in some way or the other. It must be me, as I’m the common denominator. First up, my trusty (but 10 year old) Panasonic digital video camera finally decided to give up the ghost. It had been a faithful companion for both family use as well as for shooting InkShows and GBM Shortcuts. So, I guess I’m in the market for a new digital video camera.

Next, my Flip Video Camera failed. Fortunately there is a fix for this one. This past weekend was the local big party, known as the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival. Parades, parties, carnivals and the like take over the town for essentially a three day holiday. I had lugged the tiny Flip Video around to capture the events on Friday and Saturday and had filled it up.

Sunday was to be an InkShow filming day when the Panasonic died. Not wanting to delay the process, I thought I’d dump the video off of the Flip Video to see if I could use it. Good idea but problems arose. I kept getting error after error when I tried to export or copy the video over to a hard drive. These errors literally took over the computer for long periods of time before I gave up and headed to yet another party.

On returning, I started doing some searching and discovered that the makers of the Flip have released a major “criticial” update, so I downloaded and gave it a whirl. Turns out if you have video on the device it takes quite a bit of time, so I let the update run and headed to bed.

So far, this morning all looks good for the Flip after the update. It looks like all the video was saved from the Apple Blossom Weekend, but I don’t think I’m going to trust this for filming an InkShow yet.

So. Anyone got any suggestions for a good digital video camera?