Barry's World

Choosing the right  HD hard Drive camcorder can make your brain hurt, they just so many. So finding your way through the various  data format s is your first step. They are four different formats on the market and they areMiniDV tapes, hard disc drive, DVD/BD and Flash memory cards.

MiniDV Tapes

Mini DV camcorders:

 FOR:

High quality images
Easy to use
Tapes and camcorders are cheaper

AGAINST:

Lengthy Transfer Process
Not as convenient of flexible to transfer footage
No in – camcorder editing

Once the industry accepted, what does this format offer consmers today?

MiniDV tapes are hold as the industry standard format for consumers; they’re easy to use, small, a familiar format and give high quality results. However, times change and there are more flexible and convenient formats for consumers to opt for instead.

MiniDV camcorders have up to 530 lines of resolution, making them an ideal choice for professional videographers as well as consumers. The camcorders are typical ly very compact in size and record digital video onto a small magnetic tape, with each MiniDV tape able to record 60 minutes of video at a steady recording speed, or 90 minutes in LP mode.

 Mini DV camcorders have exceptional video quality. Some motion pictures have been shot entirely with Mini DV. Most professional videographers will use Mini DV as their format of choice for shooting anything from your  wedding to nature safaris in Africa.

 Mini DV is a digital format that is inexpensive compared to the costs of other camcorder media. A typical Mini DV tape will cost almost 3 or 4 dollars and record twice as much footage as a standard DVD at equal cost. You can also record over a mini DVD disk, something you can’t do with a typical DVD-R disc

Hard Disc Drive

What are the benefits of recording onto a hard drive over obliterable media?

 FOR:

Large storage capacity (up to 240GB)
Familiar recording format
Compact

AGAINST:

More expensive than MiniDV and DVD, without the quality of MiniDV
Hard drives can fail

Basically, this type of digital camcorder format is the same as the video formats on your computer. With this type you can easily transfer your recordings to the computer for later storage on some other formats. Usually, hard disk drive storage camcorders are equipped with 120 gigabytes of hard disk space which makes a sufficient space for a couple of high quality footages. When it comes to flash-based digital camcorders, the capacity is determined by the size of the flash drive, meaning that you can always replace it with flash drives of higher capacity.

 The benefits of HDD hard disk drive camcorders re: long recording times, compact dimensions and that you can easily access your footage at random place in the recording timeline, which makes for convenient editing in –camcorder.

 A possible downside is the argument made by some that hard drives can be fragile (for example, if the camera is accidentally dropped) and they will eventually wear out. Of course, as you’re recording onto an internal medium, you will also need to transfer it off the camcorder onto a DVD or your PC at some future point. When you are transferring the footage, your footage appears as single files that you can drag and drop, much like many PC operations, making it a familiar format for consumers.

 Transferring your footage involves connecting your camcorder using DV (firewire) or USB 2.0 cables, and software if you want to edit. Of the two options, DV will be the faster method to transfer footage.

DVD/BD

savour the convenience before they disappear from shelves forever…

For:

Straight Forward and easy to use
Decent quality
Instant playback in your DVD/BD
Convenient

AGAINST:

DVD/BD disc limited capacity
Spare media could get expensive
Format not popular for camcorders

DVD camcorders are comely less popular and will soon be dropped by many manufactures. They are affordable and offer a very convenient and unsophisticated format to get to grips with. However, the chief plus point is that you can take your recently recorded footage and drop in into a DVD player or PC for instant playback without needing any extra cables or some sort of transferring procedure. You can also use your DVD enabled PC to edit footage and you have easy access to the footage on DVD because you don’t have to keep going forwards and backwards to find a particular scene, as is the case with MiniDVs.

 The downside is that the 8cm DVDs used in HD camcorders only hold around 15 – 20 minutes of footage per disc and at around £2 per disc, it can get expensive. Plus, you’ve always got to carry spares around with you and you have to decide which type of DVD to buy: write once DVDs (DVD –R) for extra storage capacity.

 The quality of images is very high, but not quite as high as that from MiniDV camcorders. But for the average vendee, the convenience and simplicity of DVD/BD far outweighs the minor difference in quality.

Flash Memory Cards

Removable media cards have enabled camcorders to get ever smaller.

FOR:

Straightforward and easy to use
Smaller and lighter camcorders
Future proof
Convenient

AGAINST:

Limited memory card capacity
More expensive

Removable media cards (SD, SDHC, and Memory Stick) are solid state (they have no moving parts), retain data without the need for power, are vey small yet have high capacities (up to 64GB at the moment, but with 1 &2TB on the way) and fast transfer speeds. Card capacities are increasing to meet the demand of ever bigger file sizes, so it possibly won’t be long before they could overhaul hard disc drives as the convenient form for video storage especially as you can transfer footage to your PC just by inserting the card.

 Editing in camcorder is easy too, as the footage can be viewed at no point in the timeline (called random access). Also, as memory cards are physically small, the camcorders can be smaller and lighter too a real benefit if you want to travel lights, as well as making it easier to handhold without introducing camera shakes. what is more, battery usage/power demand is far less and some Panasonic TVs, Sony’s Playstation 3 and some DVD players also have memory card slots so that you can insert your card and watch footage directly from it.

Of course, thee are a few downsides, such as the potential to lose memory cards (small isn’t always better!) and the current capacity limits of memory cards (though they can store more than 8cm DVDs)