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. It is amazing how efficient MP4 codecs are. My current point-and-shoot camera is a Canon Powershot SD300 which captures video using a motion JPEG codec. The SD300 is about a generation old, but still a great camera.

A friend of mine has a current-generation Casio Exilim EXZ750 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:

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 (a kick-ass video transcoding program) and transcoded a short 45 second video to DivX. Here’s the results:

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???