JVC Everio GZ-MG77 (30 GB) Hard Drive Camcorder

This video camcorder has definitely been a love/hate relationship for me. There's a lot I love, and a few things I really, really hate. So lets start with the good.

My main use for this video camcorder is for shooting video for our local community theatre. I needed a camcorder that could shoot for long periods of time without having to change tapes every 30mins. Also needed a camcorder that did stills and could handle the unusual lighting during performances. So my needs are weird compare to most peoples.

I love this video camcorder's 30gb hard drive! Not having to change tapes in the middle of a performance is a godsend! I currently have three 2 hour long shows and a wedding on the hard drive plus a bunch of stuff my kids shot and I still have tons of room to shoot more! This is great for people who need to keep the original footage around for awhile. Or like me, you don't have enough space on your computer to store all the footage you shoot of different projects at one time. Its easy to keep track of the clips on the camcorder, I can either browse through the clips or search by date it was taped.

I love how easy it is to operate this camcorder and navigate through the menus. Its all very intuitive. My 9 and 10 year old kids had no trouble picking it up and using it without any problems.

I love the small size of this camcorder, no lugging around the big camcorders of the past.

I love the picture quality. I have several choices of settings and it all comes in so clear! Even in the sometimes low light of the theatre shows. Still shots turn out pretty well for a 2.18 mp camera).

What I hate about this camcorder:

1. No firewire port. Has AV, USB and what I think is serial (round and for several prongs). Downloading still shots is a breeze (can save stills to a secure digital media card or on the hard drive. But to download video, well thats another story. You can connect the camcorder to your computer by USB, then drag the video file to your desktop (I use Mac computers). But that leads to the next thing I hate about this video camcorder.

2. Only records in MPEG-2. This is really bad. Especially if you use a Mac computer. I was not warned of this in anything I read about this camcorder when I was researching it before I bought it. I didn't buy a video camcorder that recorded directly to dvd because I found out you can't edit your video (at least not easily). Turns out, these hard drive camcorders are just the same, they record in mpeg-2 format, which isn't recognized by iMovie and turns out is a difficult format to edit. JVC does include a couple of little cheesy free programs for "editing" your video or burning to a dvd but trust me, don't even bother to install these programs on your computer because they aren't worth it. I've tried "encoders" which convert the mpeg-2 to something usable, but the ones I tried took about 3 minutes to convert 1 minute of video footage (and I wasn't happy with the quality of the converted footage). My way around this is to hook the JVC camcorder up to my VCR, hook my old camcorder (DV format) to the video out of the VCR and then put my firewire cable between the old dv camcorder to my computer to download footage from the JVC. A tiresome problem, but it keeps the quality of the video and it downloads in real time instead of the 3:1 ratio.

Though some might think this a minor problem, I don't. To record in only one type of format and for that format to be something so uneditable is ridiculous. Anyone who is seriously looking into a 30gb video camera is not going to be the type who just wants to directly burn a DVD of their video with no editing, they're serious video-types who want to edit their video. I didn't spend nearly $800 to shoot video I wasn't going to edit. With that type of money, I'm expecting to be able to give a very professional, polished final product, not some unedited video I slap together. So this was an extremely short-sighted design error on the part of JVC. If JVC would give options as to the format you want to record in and add a firewire port to easily download video footage, this would be the perfect camera. But for now I'm waiting for a hard drive video camcorder that has firewire and records in a editible format and as soon as I do I'll buy it and sell this camcorder. Though it has its strong points, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who plans to do an editing of their video. This camcorder is for someone who likes to shoot a lot of video and never do an editing.