Probably normal, but never having occasion to try, I was surprised.

Hi all.

I have a Panasonic GS200 that I’m very happy with. Although I’ve been doing lots of video editing over the past few years, I have not had occasion to try shooting from a moving vehicle before.

The wife and I were recently on vacation in the Pennsylvania Dutch Lancaster area. The landscape is beautiful there. I decided to simply stick the camcorder out of my car window while driving along and shoot the scenery as we saw it.

To my surprise when we got home and I started to transfer all the clips, every clip (3) shot from my moving car resulted in a freeze still of the first few frames, and normal audio.

I’m guessing with the camcorder set to auto focus it was just too much for it, but … never having the occasion to try this before, I’m wondering if perhaps I did something wrong setting wise or is this just not possible with this camcorder?

edit** hmm, wait a second :) all the footage shot from the Steam Engine train ride came out fine. Maybe the "head on" wind from the car speed scared the camcorder frozen. :)

Thanks
joe

Ok, I'll bet ya wanna know why this happened. :)

After extensive testing, (taking the car for a ride and trying it again) everything worked fine.

I couldn't imagine what was different. Then it dawned on me. When we shot the Pennsylvania footage I was just driving, my wife was holding the camcorder out of the window. So we took another ride and I just asked her to do what she did in Penn. This time, I noticed she held the camcorder over the top so her wrist was out of the way while looking in the lcd. Anyway, it seems ... (clear throat) that her thumb was holding the still button down. Hehehe.... now I gotta go back to Pennsylvania to get that shot :)

joe