Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera (Black)

Review by BC for Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera (Black)
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I’m friends with a lot of Boston area musicians, and I have been very supportive of them. Near the beginning of the year, I started using a Kodak Zi6 in preparation for a video project involving the Boston area music community, mostly as proof of concept for the use of modern low-cost video technology in capturing music shows in a very naturalistic, unobtrusive manner. There was a long learning curve, mostly to do with processing the raw video and audio — video cameras in general are not designed for the lighting and sound levels typical of club shows, and despite the limitations of the Zi6 — not so good low light sensitivity, a mono-only mic, and the included software was useless for my purposes — I ended up getting pretty good results.

When the Zi8 was announced and that not only it was suppose to have better low light sensitivity and a higher resolution, but also image stabilization and a jack for an external stereo microphone, it was a no-brainer to get one. What was tricker was deciding on the microphone — there were some video reviews on YouTube and such, but nobody was really recommending anything in particular. I did find one video using a Sony ECM-DS70P Electret Condenser Stereo Microphone and that seemed like it would work well: it was very compact, seemed to sound pretty good, and was relatively inexpensive. For the memory card, which you need, I just reused the 8 Gb SDHC cards I had bought for the Zi6. I had gotten spoiled with the battery life of the Zi6 — a couple of cheap, rechargeable 2400mah NiMH AA batteries would be good for all night and nearly 4 Gb of recording. The Zi8 uses a compact lithium-ion battery that lasts maybe only a third as long. Amazon had exceptional deals, though, on both compatible batteries and a charger, so I ended up getting both 2 BATTERY+CHARGER FOR KODAK KLIC-7004 V1073 V1273 M1033 and Kodak KLIC-7004 / Fuji Np-50 / Pentax DL-I68 Compatible Li-Ion Battery. Even though the specs on these batteries give them a higher capacity than the Kodak battery that comes with the Zi8, they’ve so far been lasting about 80-90% as long. For the price, though, they were/are exceptional deals.

I starting using the Zi8/Sony mic combo back at the beginning of October and the overall improvement over the Zi6 was immediately obvious: even at the same 720p resolution, the Zi8 produced much sharper, cleaner video in a club environment, and the Sony mic just rocked in terms of sound quality. The Zi6 for a long while was reputed to have the best internal mic of all the pocket digital camcorders, but the Zi8 with the Sony just blew it away. The best thing about the Zi6′s mic, though, was that it was nearly impossible to make it clip — it was able to handle insane volume levels. The only times it had trouble was with very, VERY high bass volume levels. The only drawback to the Zi8/Sony combo is that it can’t quite handle the same volume levels, especially if there is excessive midrange on the vocals. The Zi8 has an microphone input level control, but even at its lowest setting, I’ve had a couple of instances where vocals cracked due to excessive midrange volume at around 640khz. But bear in mind that is while standing near the stage and by the speakers at a rock show mixed with too much midrange. But so far, for easily most of the rock shows, the audio has turned out superb with the same processing tricks I learned using the Zi6.

There is one proviso with the audio: I now always extract the audio and use a separate audio editor (something like the free Audacity editor) to clean it up before adding it back to the video (which is actually easier than it sounds). I did notice that there was very narrow “dip” (more like a reverse spike) at about 7900khz that wasn’t correctable, but it was narrow enough and at a high enough frequency not to be noticeable. I thought that this was a Sony mic characteristic, but I recently upgraded the Zi8′s firmware to 1.06, and the “dip” shifted downwards to about 5500khz, and was a little bit wider, but not nearly as steep. You would think that this would be more noticeable, but that it’s now much more correctable than when it was at 7900khz, and the audio overall sounds cleaner than before the upgrade.

The biggest weakness with both the Zi6 and Zi8, and in general with all video cameras, as well as cameras that do video, is the software. Pretty much all concert videos need some adjustments for brightness, contrast, saturation and maybe hue, and the audio usually needs to be corrected with something like a graphic equalizer at the least. This is basic stuff, but nobody seems to include good software for this. The Zi8 comes with ArcSoft’s MediaImpression, but while it does allow some good basic adjustments to picture quality, there is nothing for audio adjustment. Both the Zi6 and Zi8 save videos in Apple’s Quicktime “Mov” format, and there isn’t a whole lot on the Windows PC side that deals with this cheaply and easily. I tried Apple’s Quicktime Pro, which is relatively cheap at $30, but I found it too slow, too limited, and too poorly designed to bother with for regular use. I also tried different conversion programs, but you always loose detail with every conversion. I ended up using VirtualDub, which is free, and some free plugins for it. But VirtualDub is not able to directly open up MOV without some geeky trickery, the details of which are beyond what I can put here. Probably for most users, another free program, Avidemux, will likely do. It’s not really meant for beginners, but you can find beginner guides easily enough online. There are some $99 programs that *might* do, but my experience with a trial version of one of them wasn’t the best, and you need a lot of horsepower to deal with a 720p video resolution. Even when using compact, no nonsense VirtualDub for processing, it typically takes my stripped-down 3 Ghz Pentium D system about an hour on average to process a typical 4 minute concert video for uploading to YouTube.

Anyone interested in my personal results can just do a YouTube search for “MelodyMatters” and all the videos there from the beginning of October to the present (except for one), were done with a Zi8. FYI….