Digital Camcorder

[Green Bottle 2]

I'm looking to invest in a digital camcorder that I can use to download movies to DVD/VCD. I do not need anything flash, just for home movies. I want to be able to connect it directly to my computer via USB or firewire ports.

Any advice on the good ones to buy and what media to go for would be greatly appreciated.

GB2

[Buttino]

Go for one that's uses Mini-DV which records in digital (it's a DAT tape) and make sure it's got at least a Firewire Out socket so you can download to a computer.

Having a Firewire In socket you can also record to the camera from a computer.

Some of the new Sony ones do record to directly to DVD but I've no experience of these.

Trev

[Green Bottle 2]

Many thanks for the advice. Thanks for the g-mail as well.

GB2

[Conan the Librarian]

I wasn't even looking for a mini DV but on emerging from Jessops last month but one, they had a special offer on a JVC GRD-70 for £199.95 which was far too big a bargain to leave on the shelf.

You will need a fairly reasonable PC and one with Firewire and a goodly amount of hard disk free, to get the best from a mini DV. Editing and authoring suites are a worthwhile add on and make the production of some sleep inducing family opus so much easier. I use Pinnacle Studio and there are some Google bargains there as well.

Mini DV is so much more enjoyable than older forms of camcorder and the chances of producing (and making copies of) reasonable productions are very much higher than in times gone by.


Conan

Conan

[Taffer]

I believe Panasonic are now doing hard disc camcorders - in 20GB and 30GB memory capacities.

To put that in perspective, 30GB is good enough for about 35hrs of filming.

Should be enough for a home movie or two.

[IO540]

It depends on how much of the data gets thrown away in compression.

A standard 60-minute mini-DV tape holds the equivalent of about 15GB of data.

This is about the same as a DAT DDS-3 computer backup tape which is mechanically very similar (but quite deliberately not the same :O ) and which holds 12GB of UNcompressed data and perhaps a few GB more if compression can be used.

There are camcorders that use MPEG compression to pack the data more densely and then one can store an hour's recording in a few GB. Whether the loss of quality is noticeable is a matter of opinion.

The main drawback of a cam with a hard disk in it is that the data cannot be taken out - short of transferring to a PC. This is stating the obvious I know, but (as someone who has done their share of "home movies"; one's kids mostly) I can tell you that you must not believe the hype about the whole world being into creating home movies! It just doesn't happen. Transferring a video to a PC and editing it (using the software provided), adding in music, etc, is fun to do once or twice and after that one gets thoroughly fed up with it.

But one still wants to preserve the precious footage of one's kids growing up. Where to store this? One could transfer it to a 400GB PC hard disk; OK until the HD crashes and then you lose the lot. One could back it up to something, but what? It's a LOT of gigabytes. I really don't see many people buying a £300 DDS3 or DDS4 tape drive and backing it to computer tape!!

So, the smartest thing is to just keep the original DV tapes. They have quite high coercivity (i.e. once magnetised, they are hard to erase) and will last for at least 10 and probably 20 years. One day, soon, when we have optical disks that hold 1000GB you will transfer the whole lot to one of these. Until then there is no better way to store the stuff than just keep the original tapes.

That's why I think all camcorders that record onto anything but DV tape are a waste of time - except for special applications where the recording is always immediately processed and the original can be dumped.