Topic: Looking to purchase small size HD cam

[taper420]

My work is looking to make a purchase on some small handheld HD^2 (that's High-def, and hardrive) cams. We already have 3 Sony FX-1's, these smaller cams would be to give out to people that aren't neccesarily part of the production department.

My boss suggested the JVC's. The problem I'm finding with all these HD (that's Harddrive) based cams is the software required for extracting the video. I'm looking for an "open" format, that would enable drag and drop importing. We don't want to have to install this proprietary importing software on all the pc's and have to worry about mac compatibility as well. Any ideas?

[taper420]

The more research I do, the more it seems that ALL of the consumer HDD cams use a hard-to-manage codec.

Yeah... I know... I'm on the wrong forum... just thought I'd brush it past here to see if I got any responces.

[stantheman1976]

For the easiest results I'd get a tape based cam like the Canon HV20 and down scale your videos for now.  You can still keep the tape shot in HD for later use. 

The problem with all HDD camcorders is they shoot in compressed formats that are diffcult to edit.  DV tape was made for ease of use.

[guitard]

Yeah... I know... I'm on the wrong forum... just thought I'd brush it past here to see if I got any responces.

Not the wrong forum, but just not a forum that really delves deeply into video.

For that kind of forum, you want to go here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/

[bluntforcetrauma]

HD quality is not as good as DV tape, different encoding form the mpeg 2 that DV tape can.  Hared drive recroding compresses differently leaving fringes and artifacts in the final product visually

[hummat]

DV tape was made for ease of use.

And a hard copy backup

-jay

[stantheman1976]

DV tape was made for ease of use.

And a hard copy backup

-jay

Amen!

[Wiesel]

The problem I'm finding with all these HD (that's Harddrive) based cams is the software required for extracting the video. I'm looking for an "open" format, that would enable drag and drop importing. We don't want to have to install this proprietary importing software on all the pc's and have to worry about mac compatibility as well. Any ideas?

You usually don't need special software for HDD based cams. You just plug the cam to your computer via usb and it becomes a removable drive like any other external hdd - you can easily drag&drop files to and from the camera. DV tape is imo more "difficult" to handle since you need special software to capture the video from the tape and it only works in realtime (at least on consumer cams).

Hared drive recroding compresses differently leaving fringes and artifacts in the final product visually

The video compression quality has nothing to do with the medium it gets recorded to. In fact, on a HDD cam you're not bound to a specific bitrate like on tape recorders which allows higher bitrates.