Posted by nobody special on 11/25/05 06:03

All of these modern camcorders can play right out to a TV using a
supplied cable, if you are just trying to show them stuff like their
form while throwing or whatever, why even transfer to the computer,
with a smaller screen, in the first place? You will be spending all
your time digitizing tapes instead of coaching or whatever. You'd be
setting yourself up for more work than you know.

If you are doing more sophisticated work like advanced
kinetics/biomechanics work, where you want really precise control of
forward, reverse, and slomo, on-site and immediate, I think what would
work best for that is any camera with a firewire connection running to
a laptop. The laptop could be set to digitize live, which would save
you some time and let the teaching be immediate. Products for this on
the PC side would include the DVRack laptop software. On the mac side,
you could just set imovie, or final cut express, to a live import
setting, and capture in real time... if you wanted to do further
editing of highlights later, the footage is already on there, waiting.
But realize laptops may not have the screen size you need to show what
you're wanting to show to more than one person at a time. For that,
just playing right out of the camcorder to a nearby Tv set would still
be the best/simplest answer.

To help visually sort individuals rapidly on the TV while
fast-forwarding, keep a simple five-dollar dry-erase board near the
camera, and shoot 10 seconds of it with the subject name, before the
activity starts.

Whatever else, I don't think you want a DVD-recording camera, stick
with a DV tape camcorder; you take a bigger resolution hit with it's
compression and transcoding, the media is more expensive per hour and
doesn't run as long. Just my opinion.

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