purelithium said:
Ok, well after reading the reviews on camcorderinfo.com for the competition to the JVC camera, I can't see any reason why I wouldn't buy it. The MiniDV cameras that are in the same pricerange are either worse quality or about the same.
If the only difference between the cameras is one is MiniDV and one is consumer MPEG-2 based (i.e. they have similar quality lenses and electronics) then the MiniDV camera will always produce better quality footage. Some other reasons not to go w/that kind of camera are:
1. After you copy the footage onto your Mac you'll have transcode the footage into something iMovie and edit (such as MiniDV). How long this take will depend on how fast of a Mac you have.
1a. Transcoding the footage can result in a loss of quality
1b. If you make a DVD of your video (i.e. "My Trip to Vancouver") then the footage goes thru the harsh DVD quality MPEG-2 compression again which will really degrade the quality.
2. You can only get an hour worth of footage onto a 4gig microdrive if you are shooting at the highest quality setting (which you'd be nuts to shoot anything less). That's not a lot of video before you have to dump it onto a computer (or buy more microdrives which cost a lot more than MiniDV tape does).
3. If your hard drive w/all the footage on it fails then all the video is gone. MiniDV tapes are cheap enough that you don't need to reuse them so you'll always have a back up of your original footage.
I don't understand why you say it's so much better. Is there an article or story on this direct comparison that proves that MiniDV is better than the MPEG-2 recorders you're slamming?
I don't have a head to head comparison link at my finger tips, but MiniDV has higher data rate (29 Mbits/sec vs a max of 8-9Mbit/s) and better color sampling (4:1:1 vs 4:2:0). The MPEG-2 recorders are inferior in terms of quality compared to MiniDV cameras and they are inferior in terms of connivence compared to MiniDV cameras. That's why I don't recommend them. In the future, as the cameras get better, I'm sure I'll start recommending them over DV cameras, but they just aren't there yet.
Plus, Wouldn't it take a lot less time to dump video from a solidstate drive than to dump it from a tape?
Yes. But, you have to take into account the time it would take you to transcode the footage into a format iMovie can handle (such as MiniDV) and the time it would take to make a backup of the source footage (burning it to a DVD for example). Unless, of course, you wouldn't mind losing all the video if your HDD crashes.
Glad to hear you are looking at a MiniDV camera. All around you'll have an easier time w/it
DrRock,
There is no loss of quality/additional compression as long as you stay xfer via FW (it's a bit-for-bit data xfer). All the compression happens before the signal is written to the tape.
Lethal
