Hector Peebles’ JISC Blog

I’ve been researching into which would be the best video camera for JISC to use which has the capability for usb webstreaming. Since we already own a Sony MiniDV camera (the Sony HDR-HC7E) which covers most of the technical requirements I set for an all purpose camera (HD, MiniDV, external mic plugin, etc…) , I thought it made most sense to get another Sony MiniDV handycam which is compatible with everything it does, but which also can do the webstreaming. This led me to look into the Sony DCR-HC37E.
This camera is receiving rave reviews wherever it goes, partly because of its ease of use, but also for its high quality of components and features. It doesn’t do HD and you can’t plug an external mic into it, but that doesn’t worry me seeing as the other camera JISC owns can do this, and I figure that if I’m going to be webstreaming then the camera is going to have to be plugged into my computer, so I can just plug any external mics or sound sources straight into that. I’ll be able to swap tapes between them because they’re both MiniDV, so any prerecorded stuff that’s done on the pro camera can be switched to the webstreaming one for uploading. As long as it’s not in HD of course…
I reckon this is going to be great and I cant wait for the camera to arrive in the post so I can get experimenting and streaming…
JISC TV here we come! Expect to see things here…

The Comms team have recently been asked to “get to grips” with using Twitter, as a means of commenting/promoting JISC work, in preparation for using Twitter fairly heavily at the JISC Conference 2008 ( tag: jiscconference08 ). Opinions are mixed as to how effectively it can be used, but regardless of this I intend to work my way round the team getting eveyone signed up to it and then we’ll just have to see what happens…get tweating you lot…