Like a lot of people, I’m a freak about digital cameras. There’s just something really cool about digital’s instant gratification, no film hassles and shooting a bazillion shots/only keep the best. One of the features of most point-and-shoot digital cameras that is highly underrated is their ability to shoot video. With a modern camera you can capture video at 640×480 and 30 frames per second — video that looks darn good even on a large-screen TV.

One of the latest improvements to the usability of video is the use of MP4 “codecs”:1. It is _amazing_ how efficient “MP4″:2 codecs are. My current point-and-shoot camera is a Canon Powershot SD300 which captures video using a “motion JPEG”:3 codec. The “SD300″:4 is about a generation old, but still a great camera.

A friend of mine has a current-generation “Casio Exilim EXZ750″:5 which captures video in MP4.

To illustrate how efficient the MP4 is here’s a table showing the video capacity of the two cameras at 640×480/30-ish FPS:

table{text-align:center}.
| *Camera* | *Video Capacity (1 GB card)* |
|<. Canon SD300| About 9 minutes|
|<. Casio EXZ750|About 60 minutes|

As I mentioned above, MP4 codecs just makes video way more usable. Even in the era of cheap mass storage it’s just impractical to keep a lot of huge video files. To see how much more efficient the SD300 would be if it shot in MP4 instead of motion JPEG, I broke out a copy “Vdub”:7 (a kick-ass video transcoding program) and transcoded a short 45 second video to “DivX”:6. Here’s the results:

table{text-align:center}.
| *Codec* | *File Size (45 second video)* |
|<. Motion JPEG| 85 MB|
|<. DivX|5 MB|

The motion JPEG file is a *huge* file. It wouldn’t take many of these to fill even a 300 GB drive. However, the DivX file, while still kind of large, is very practical. In my experience, 5 MB is about the size of a high-quality encoded digital song — pretty reasonable. So next time you’re looking for a new point-and-shoot, make sure it videos in MP4.

Zoinger says, Canon… are you listening???

[1(Wikipedia on codec)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec

[3(Wikipedia on Motion JPEG)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG

[2(Wikipedia on MP4)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp4

[6(Wikipedia on DivX)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX

[4(Amazons SD300 page)]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00064O89Y/qid=1137703460

[5(Amazons Casio Exilim EXZ750 page)]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007KQWDC/qid=1137702996

[7(Vdubs homepage)]http://www.virtualdub.org/