The second place I recorded footage was at a drag racing event in Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada. Drag racing was chosen because it's a fast pace sport over a quarter mile with varying lighting conditions - allowing for full use of the optical zoom, evaluation of image stabilization, and testing the microphone at long range.
Day time recording...
Night time recording...
If you would like to see the original videos without any processing from YouTube, you can download this ZIP file (88.8MB) to view the three samples.
Once the test videos were recorded, transferring them to a computer was simple - just plug the USB cable into the camcorder, flip the power switch on the camcorder, and Windows will detect the device and allows you to copy the files over to your PC using Windows Explorer. Once the videos are copied to your PC you will see they are in MP4 format.
The Cyberlink MediaShow software that comes bundled with camcorder was also evaluated as part of this review. The software scans your PC for videos and allows you to make minimal changes (such as adding captions and music). The Microsoft Windows MovieMaker appears to have much more flexibility than MediaShow, but unfortunately MovieMaker does not support importing the MP4 file format. Likely the best feature of MediaShow is the ability to upload videos directly to YouTube. Ironically this feature never worked after several attempts and only resulted in errors, as seen in the screenshot below.
