pick the right HD hard Drive camcorder can make your brain hurt, they just so many. So finding your way through the many data format s is your first step. You have different stroage formats for you HD Camcorder 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 handy of flexible to transfer footage
No in – camcorder editing
Once the industry standard, what does this format offer consmers today?
MiniDV tapes are reckoned to be the industry standard format for consumers; they’re easy to use, small, a familiar format and give high quality results. However, modern world change and there are more flexible and convenient formats for consumers to opt for instead.
The MiniDV is probably the least and most time-consuming option to transfer footage from for the beginner, as you have to play the whole tape to transfer it.
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 near 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 supplant 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 user-friendly 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 in time 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 period of time. 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 quicker method to transfer footage.
DVD/BD
Enjoy 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 democratic for camcorders
DVD camcorders are comely less renowned and will soon be dropped by many manufactures. They are economical and offer a very handy and easy format to get to grips with. However, the chief plus point is that you can take your recently recorded footage and download 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 norm purchaser, 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), keep 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 ever growing to meet the demand of ever bigger file sizes, so it potentially won’t be long before they could overtake hard disc drives as the convenient form for video storage especially as you can transfer footage to your PC just by inserting the card.
Flash memory is a non-volatile computer storage that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. It is a technology that is primarily used in memory cards and USB flash drives for general storage and transfer of data between computers and other digital products. Since flash memory is non-volatile, no power is needed to maintain the information stored in the chip. In addition, flash memory offers fast read access times (although not as fast as volatile DRAM memory used for main memory in PCs) and better kinetic shock resistance than hard disks. These characteristics explain the popularity of flash memory in portable devices.
Flash memory costs far less than byte-programmable EEPROM and therefore has become the dominant technology wherever a significant amount of non-volatile, solid state storage is needed. Example applications include PDAs (personal digital assistants), laptop computers, digital audio players, digital cameras and mobile phones. It has also gained popularity in console video game hardware, where it is often used instead of EEPROMs or battery-powered static RAM (SRAM) for game save data
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)
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