Hard drive camcorders

daryl wrote on 6/6/2006, 6:38 AM

Hey y'all, I did a couple of searches and didn't find any previous posts about this. I am considering purchasing a hard drive camcorder, captures to a 20 to 40 G hard drive. Does anyone have experience with one of these, should I go with one of these or stick with my current miniDV format?
Thoughts?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 6/6/2006, 6:57 AM

I assume that you're talking about the consumer hard drive camcorders, like the JVC Everio series. These camcorders (as well as HDV camcorders) record in MPEG2 format and as hundreds of posts here on the forum can attest, editing MPEG2 footage presents a LOT more obstacles than editing good old DV footage. Vegas can and will edit MPEG2, but it isn't nearly as straight-forward as editing DV. In Vegas, ALL MPEG2 footage will need to be rerendered when you go to output to your finished product, so there are also video quality issues to consider. I suggest you stick with MiniDV for now.

John

farss wrote on 6/6/2006, 7:16 AM

The other MUCH bigger problem with that line of cameras is once the disk is full, well that's it.
If tape and all it's dramas are getting you down invest in a HDD recorder thingy and record to tape and HDD. That way you've got a backup.

Bob.

daryl wrote on 6/6/2006, 8:00 AM

Thanks much John and Bob, that's kinda what I expected. Glad I didn't jump the gun. And yes, this is for something small and easy to carry on vacation, but I still wanted to be able to edit the footage with decent results if I wanted to.

C ya!

Laurence wrote on 6/6/2006, 2:25 PM

I did a project recently where I needed to use quite a bit of footage off of some DVDs. I changed used the Womble MPEG VCR program to losslessly cut down the VOBs to just what I needed in mpeg2 format. Then I changed the extensions to m2t and ran Gearshift to make proxies. I edited the project using the proxies and switched gears back for the final render, just like I would have with HD footage. it worked great and only added a single generation to the mpeg2 footage on the final edited dvd.

Hopefully Vegas 7 will change from the VFW to the DirectShow approach so it can use GPU accelerating graphics cards like Premier Pro. If Sony does this, editing with mpeg 2 will become a whole lot easier.

farss wrote on 6/6/2006, 3:45 PM

I'd be looking into a A1 or C1 or if your budget doesn't extend that far the C3.

Bob.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/7/2006, 5:32 AM

funny you were looking in to this daryl... so was I. :) It took me going to b&h's website to see they record mpeg-2. So I'm just going to get a DV one instead. Love the HDD aspect but I want DV, at least. This looks like it's to replace the DVD cam's.