HD Video Camcorders Question

mitcs0ke · Post by **mitcs0ke** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 3:10 am

I know there is a huge and wonderful amount of talent on this these boards
with help I and others have gotten in the past and all of your help and
insight is much appreciated.

So my question is this:
I want to move up a little closer to HD,,,, BUT
I want to stay with a tape type camcorder due to the ease of editing,
I love working with raw dv, and storage ( yes storage because I just lost
300gs of video in a backup hard drive failure that was less than 8 months old.)
BUT I still have the DV tapes!!

Suggestions,,,comments,,, insights!

Thanks

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 3:39 am

Canon HV40

Post by **Ken Berry** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 3:46 am

Well, as you may guess from my posts, I am a particular fan of HDV format, which of course uses DV tapes but films in high def mpeg-2. Captures are real time because of the tapes and thus much slower than AVCHD camera. And the cameras themselves are bigger, again because of the tape mechanism. But the end quality is at least as good as AVCHD (and some pros would argue, better...) Moreover, HDV is a tried and tested format, easy to edit, and does not require a Rolls Royce system to edit and and play it, as does AVCHD. Some say that HDV/DV are on their way out, and sadly, this could be so -- though I believe there will long remain a niche market at the pro end of the scale for the format.

Canon, Sony and Panasonic are the main companies that produce HDV cameras, and I won't recommend a specific model -- you can Google for reviews for that. I personally have opted for Canon camera after camera, and so did the same for my HDV one. But each person who uses a different brand will no doubt opt for that brand and model... so there seems little point in my recommending one over the other.

Be aware, though, that JVC appears to make a hard disk camera(s) which can film in AVCHD and what for want of a better term is HDV. But if I can use the term, it is 'full' HDV i.e. using a frame format of 1920 x 1080, instead of the international HDV standard of 1440 x 1080. As such, if you do a search, you will find that owners of this camera sometimes have difficulty having that version of HDV recognised, at least by VS. I am not sure about other software packages.