Video Formats

wstagner · Post by **wstagner** » Wed Jan 27, 2010 12:06 am

I currently have a Panny StanDef miniDV digicam and am considering an HD cam that stores video on an SD or SDHC card.

I have 2 uses for it. Primary use is no. 1 below.

1)I have a customer in another country who is shooting video for us (they'll have the camera) and they will need to transfer the vids from the SD card to email to my USA office for minimal editing and subsequent U toob posting.

2)I'd like to take the contents of some of my mini DV tapes, transfer them to the new camcorder's SD card. Then upload the SD card contents to VS for editing. Why? I'm thinking that transfer direct from SD card is faster than a firewire connection. UNLESS, of course, that's not possible.

The problem I see with the "flips" and similar devices is that they lack zoom, remote control (which the customer needs) and a number of other genuine camcorder features.

If there's already info somewhere on this board regarding this topic, let me know what to search for.

TIA,
Walt

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Wed Jan 27, 2010 12:51 am

If I were you I would check out Videomaker.com. They do monthly reviews of camcorders and have an extensive backlog of articles and buying guides.

wstagner · Post by **wstagner** » Wed Jan 27, 2010 1:12 am

Thanks, Jeff I've been there, done that PLUS searched the net AND visited several video stores.

No joy, I'm afraid.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Wed Jan 27, 2010 2:48 am

SD cards are a storage medium
Tapes are a storage medium.

To get video from a tape to a computer you normally connect the camcorder to the computer with an IEEE1394 firewire cable and play the video on your camcorder and at the same time record that video on the computer.
Therefore a 1 hour film takes 1 hour to record onto the computer.

Video on an SD card can simply be copied over to the computer like any other computer file such as a word document, spreadsheet, JPG image etc.
Therefore if you have a card reader, that 1 hour video can be copied to the computer in a few minutes.

Regarding your plan to email the video on the SD card, you might not be able to do that because most email service providers set a limit on file sizes.
One way to get your video from A to B is to upload it to an internet storage site such as Microsoft SkyDrive which enables you to store several gigabytes and then share that with others. You would have to check the maximum file size that can be uploaded in one go, this might mean splitting the file up into smaller chunks. One way to do this is to use a compression program such as Winzip or Winrar that does not just compress the file but splits the "zip file" up into smaller chunks. You would then email a link to the other person who would then download your files and reassemble them (unzip) at their end.

wstagner · Post by **wstagner** » Wed Jan 27, 2010 5:52 am

Thanks for all of that Steve.
That's the part that I'm aware of.

Most (all?) HD vid cams all use avchd so if those files are each stored on the sd card, what might the filetype for those files be?

When I get a file can I play it back without using VS?

The emailed files to me are only 30 secs in duration each but there might be 15 or 20 in a week. If email is a problem the customer can ftp them to my site which is already set up.