How do you like miniDV?
 

I am considering purchasing the HV20. I am concerned about the media: miniDV. How do you HV20 owners like it? How are you converting to DVD, or are you just holding onto the tapes until a convenient high def DVD burning system is available? Do you think the quality is better than miniDVD? And now that AVCHD is out, should I be looking for a camera with AVCHD that records to a disc instead of going with miniDV? Thanks for your help!
Shirley

Tape-based is my favorite for now. The first reason is image quality: it's still far better than the memory- and disc-based media (even the new HG10). The second reason is long record times: it's easier to take 10 hours of footage on a vacation than the equivalent in 16 GB flash cards. (Hard drives are more capacious but also much more fragile.)

When flash cards are cheaper and the codecs are better, I'll switch. Maybe that will be the HG20 or HG30.

Thanks, Daniel! How do you archive your footage, or are you just keeping your recordings on the miniDV for now?
Shirley

Three backup storage systems: one live, one disconnected backup in the closet, and one remote backup.

An external 500 GB drive would be enough for most people ($300 in total), but even 2TB arrays are getting pretty inexpensive.

I bought a WD 500 GB external hard drive for $110, which admittedly was a pretty great deal, but the big box retailers are advertising them for $130-$150.

To answer the original poster, the tapes are an extremely reliable solution for backing up your "master" footage - certainly more reliable than a hard drive or a home-burned DVD. When I was looking at the HV20 in the spring, I considered the tapes a major downside. Now that I'm actually using it, I'm really glad I went the tape route (vs. hard drive). Of course it would be nice to have drag-and-drop copying functionality, but the image quality and automatic master storage advantages of the tapes are much more important to me.

reliability of tapes
 

I had the same opinion when I bought a canon HV10 just one year ago, now I'm less sure about the reliability.
Although I use exclusively Sony HDV tapes in order to minimize dropouts, my camera generates a dropout roughly every 5 minutes of footage, and there is no way to retrieve the damaged pictures. I noticed that the frequency of occurrence of these dropouts varies of lot from one cassette to another one, even of the same brand and model.
Since in the past I had similar problems with a Standard miniDV Canon, I don't feel so safe with tapes.
I already posted about this problem, but it seems it is not so common and I can't realize why.

Marco

I personally do not like tape systems, however I do use them because this is the norm for now. I have written an "HDV vs AVCHD" blog article here:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/09/30/hdv-vs-avchd/

While HDV as a marketing term meaning MP@H-14 over DV cassette, no one prevents from storing HDV data stream on a hard drive. In fact, as people in the JVC forum found out, Everio camcorders work just like that. I would rather prefer "HDV on an HDD" to AVCHD for the reasons of compatibility and lesser requirements for computing power.

MPEG-4 is a winner in sat video delivery and may become a preferred way in cable video delivery (thank you, now you can throw out your QAM receiver), but the situation is not that obvious for acquisition and editing. So far HDV is a better all around standard. I don't know why camcorder manufacturers use small 30-60GB drives while Apple uses 160GB drives?

In regards to HDDs, I don't really like them because they have mechanical parts. And they are not removable. Adding insult to injury, many camcorders equipped with an HDD and with a memory card slot do not allow transferring files from HDD to a card. What's up with that? Get real people, you are not making just cameras anymore, you are making computers with lenses, so make them behave like proper computers do.

I'll wait for $10 16GB memory cards, until then I will be using tapes.

i am getting a sony vaio fz11z laptop which i have been told can make bd discs from hdv cams,best of luck what ever you get.chris