dv tape or hard drive? « Videomaker Community Forums

n90mbs
Member

I am looking to upgrade my camera. I thought of using dv tape but also think a hard drive camera might be a better way to go since it seems it would allow for much quicker transfer time to computer for editing with no loss of quality. Please advise as to your choice and reasoning. Thanks.

Posted 3 years ago #
Rob Grauert
Post Production Host

I never liked the idea of a hard drive in a camera. Of course no one drops a camera on purpose, but accidents happen. If your camera went through any kind of abuse, there may be a chance it lost footage.

If you want to get away from tape, I'd go with a solid state camcorder.

But remember that nothing is error proof. Solid state can still go bad, I just think it's less likely than HDD camcorders.

Rob Grauert, Jr
http://www.robgrauert.com
http://command-r.tumblr.com

Posted 3 years ago #
EarlC
Moderator

SDHC card recordables are the wave of the near future.

Posted 3 years ago #
Rob Grauert
Post Production Host

what's the largest capacity of SDHC? To be honest, I've never seen them in a pro camera. It's uaually P2 or SxS when it comes to solid state.

Posted 3 years ago #
EarlC
Moderator

AVCCAM's, Rob. Panasonic's AG-HMC150, JVC's soon-to-be-released (April, I believe) GY-HM100, to name a couple of good shooters. There's a host of camcorders out there in all price ranges that use cards, from Sony's proprietary stick, to SD and SDHC, and most of the other iterations as well.

These cards come, of course in capacities from under a gig, to 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32, and prices for 32s are coming down to the $50 mark - not a bad investment for something (32Gig SDHC) that in the Panasonic, at highest quality, will record 180 minutes. Mileage varies, but I can live with that. Makes a 16 good for 90 minutes, a half-hour more recording than the MiniDV tapes I've been using in my Canons.

Posted 3 years ago #
CraftersOfLight
Member

On the SDHCs you want to pay attention to the Class rating (speed at which it can record/be written to. Currently class 6 seems to be the fastest so far). The camera's operating manual (sometimes listed in the specs as well) will tell you the minimum class rating for that camera.

Life is not a guided tour nor a destination.
It is a journey. Take the time to enjoy your family, friends and surroundings.
Build memories. Share experiences. Travel at sight speed not light speed. (C)

Posted 3 years ago #
XTR-91
Member

I use and recommend a hard disk camcorder. DV tapes tend to add noise to the recording from the camera mic and have less convenience when copying to a computer. SD card camcorders are the easiest to use when managing and copying files. Expensive SD cards (usually 10-20 GB) must be purchased for a reasonable amount of storage for video. If you don't need storage for long documentaries or a bunch of stock footage, SD is a good choice.

Like EarlC said, you'll need SD cards with high writing speed for video.

Posted 3 years ago #
Eventvideoguy
Member

If you are just recording home movies and for ease of use to get them from the cam to computer. Hard Drive cam is the way to go. Editing will be limited but still okay. But like I said for home use it's great. I just steered my father in that direction.

He has tried every tape version as well as solid state and this is the best for him because all it is, is

1. Film

2. Connect

3. Download

4. Watch

Posted 3 years ago #
JMM
Member

Well, the DV technologie is kinda really bad, the sampling GOP is like 4:1:1 and the tape used to make it is low quality compared to betacam or any professional tape device.

So i guess hard drive could record a better picture quality since its not limited by the tape but by the size of the hard drive and your camera specs.

Television Technician
http://www.vimeo.com/julienmarion
Sorry for my english im french

Posted 3 years ago #
EarlC
Moderator

Your English is awesome and very well stated. Hope you post more often about things video.

Posted 3 years ago #
composite1
Moderator

Certainly solid state cards are the future. I'm with Rob on a Harddrive camera. Anything goes wrong and you've got a nice paperweight to lug around. I also agree yet differ with JMM. Having worked with high-end pro cameras for years he's absolutely right about the exponential differences between pro and mini-dv. However, if as many who ascribe to these posts don't have access to such expensive gear mini-dv is an excellent solution. Portable harddrives are much more attractive for now despite their cost. Firestore's start out at 40GB and go to 100GB. Unlike the card based solutions they aren't tiny and are much harder to misplace.

It's good that solid state card prices are going down which will make them more attractive as time goes on. I actually still like tape however, because of the solutions it is still (so far) the cheapest and most stable avenue for storage. We currently store all of our digitized footage on external drives, but keep the original footage on tape. Now that we've transitioned to HD that's still a workable option. I personally have been eyeballing the JVC camera Earl mentioned and the Canon 5D MarkII since both are card based only, storing original footage will still be an issue.

My question is; great as all of this new solid state tech is, what about the ability to validate footage? If there is a question of imagery shot on film, you can always go back to the original roll or reel. Same with video tape if you want to check for tampering. With the ease of transferring video footage from card to harddrive, how tough will it be to verify an original shot from a 'doctored' one?

H.Wolfgang Porter, Composite Media Producer
Dreaded Enterprises Unlimited, Inc.
http://www.dreadedenterprises.com

Posted 3 years ago #