Previous Image « » Next Image Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge

An Overview Of Blank Media Storage

Blank media hasn't really changed in a conceptual sense - it's what you always need when you want to record video and audio. But the media that you would reach for today is vastly different from the media you would've reached for 15 or 20 years ago. While today you might reach for an SD card or a Mini DV tape, a few years ago the media probably would have been 8mm, Hi8 or VHS-C.

What else can be said about today's blank media? Well, quite a lot, actually. Let's see what's out there right now.

The interesting thing about today's camcorders is that you may or may not actually need media to make them tick anymore. The rapid growth of camcorders that use hard drives or Flash memory has taken us to an interesting place. These are camcorders that don't actually need any kind of media to be inserted to function, so, as long as its battery is charged, you can simply grab that camcorder off the shelf and start shooting. However, you do have to keep an eye on your camcorder to see how much capacity for recording you have left. The nice thing about these types of camcorders is that, if you do run out of space on the memory or hard drive, you can easily clear off previously-recorded video to make room. And transferring recorded video clips from these camcorders is as easy as plugging the camcorder into your computer's USB port and initiating a copy or move operation. Then again, a growing number of hard drive- and flash-based camcorders also have an SD or SDHC card slot, making it easy to move clips off or record clips directly onto the memory card.

There are also devices that we refer to generically as DCDs, or Direct Capture Devices. A DCD is essentially a laptop hard drive inside an enclosure with a battery and a specialized controller, which is attached to a camcorder via the FireWire connection. These devices give tape-based camcorders a new lease on life, by capturing the bitstream that would be recorded to tape in real time. When you get back to your edit bay, you simply disconnect the DCD from your camera and attach it to your computer, where you can now either edit directly on the DCD (depending on the model) or copy the captured video directly to your hard drive at speeds that are generally faster than real time. (Compare that to capturing tape, where you must capture in real time due to the nature of tape.)

Tape, for now, isn't going anywhere - while there are fewer tape-based camcorders on the shelves at your favorite electronics store, that store will certainly be carrying plenty of blank tapes and at least a couple of tape-based camcorder models for quite a while. Tape has some big advantages: it's cheap, fairly durable and will be available for years to come. However, the biggest disadvantage of tape is that, if the scene you need to access is in the middle of a particular cassette, there will be some fast-forwarding or rewinding involved. Any other medium, be it memory, optical disc or magnetic disk, will be able to access any clip at random without fast forwarding or rewinding.

DVD-based camcorders were more common just a few years ago than they are now. There is a smattering of DVD-based camcorders still on shelves, but the market shifted quickly to other recording formats. DVD has its advantages and disadvantages, just like every other format. You can see the output of a DVD recorded in one of these camcorders with a minimum of fuss, but the camcorders themselves are some of the largest you'll come across these days.

There was exactly one Blu-ray Disc camcorder, made by Hitachi, but, unfortunately, it is getting rather difficult to track down. Like DVD camcorders, it allowed you to make Blu-ray Discs that were ready to play with little fuss; but it was also a rather large camcorder. An added drawback is that blank 8cm Blu-ray Discs are extremely difficult to find. A few camcorders allowed you to record AVCHD data streams to standard DVDs and play them back in high-definition on Blu-ray Disc (and some HD DVD) set-top players, but these camcorders are also becoming rare.

Faced with these cold, cruel truths, we would have to say at this point that it is probably best to think of DVD and Blu-ray Disc as better distribution formats than acquisition formats.

Back in the bad ol' days, writing to Flash memory was a slow affair, but Flash is now fast, available at speeds of up to 6MB/sec. This is more than fast enough for an MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or full-fledged AVCHD data stream. So Flash memory has become a mainstream video acquisition format.

Flash is now pretty cheap, too. The same cards that cost $50 a few years ago are now about $20. Alternately, the same $50 could buy a card with somewhere between 4 and 10 times the capacity. Flash memory for video has standardized on SD, SDHC and Memory Stick. We expect the recently-announced SDXC format to establish a foothold in the camcorder space as well.

While some recently-announced professional camcorders use standard, off-the-shelf memory cards, many professional camcorders use P2 or SxS cards instead. These cards actually use multiple Flash memory devices and a specialized controller chip that allows the cards to be accessed at higher speeds, allowing for recording higher-quality video with less compression. However, that speed will cost you: the cheapest professional Flash memory cards are still at least $400 at the time of this writing.

What's on the horizon? The next camcorders may well have Wi-Fi or 4G wireless connections that allow you to upload your recordings to a computer or a video-sharing site in real time. But until that time, tape, cards and discs will be sticking around.

Charles Fulton is Videomaker's Technical Editor.

Click here to download a PDF Manufacturer's list of Videomaker's Blank Media Buyer's Guide 2009.