Camcorders Finally Find Hard Drives

[Chris Hurd]

From the New York Times by David Pogue:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/te...82b8b8d7525c0d

About the JVC Everio GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200.

They're tapeless; recording 1 hour of Mpeg2 on a removeable 4-gig MicroDrive

Very interesting, a sign of things to come? It's about time!

It's a two-page article -- be sure to check out both pages. There are some real limitations with these little camcorders but it's still a very interesting development in my opinion. They're each just over $1,000 with the MicroDrives going for about $200.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Those do look interesting, but seems like they need some refinement. However I see 2GB compact flash cards falling in price near the $100 level, and 4 GB cards for under $300. If history repeats itself then it won't be long before the 4GB cards are under $200, so who would want a 4GB microdrive? :-)

[Giroud Francois]

that is really a pitty.
4 gig micro drive ?
When any laptop or mp3 player has now a 2.5" 40gig drive ?
the space needed by a tape transport in a camera would take very easily such a drive.

[Chris Hurd]

I think they were going for the smallest practical size possible on that one. And perhaps they definitely had to have removeable media. That might explain it...

Isn't there a new micro-mini version of Secure Digital media now? Once prices come down on 4GB media in that format, we may see further... eh, shrinkage of the camera.

[Tony Hall]

I think tape is a great value when you consider how much information it holds and how much they cost. I think it will be a while before that kind of camera is worth it to me. Give me a DV camera with large removable hard drive. I wish I could use DV tapes with my digital SLR. You could store like 13gb on a tape. Of course you'd have to capture your photos which might suck.

DV Rack seems to be a great alternative to tape right now if you've got a big hard drive on your laptop.

[James Emory]

Yet another pirating tool for the movie studios to worry about in theaters. It will be on the internet that much faster and cleaner.

[Dan Euritt]

those little jvc cameras apparently record mpeg2 at 8.5Mbps, which is xlnt... and it's hard to appreciate tapeless media until you have worked with it.

the panasonic av-100 records to sd media at 6Mbps, but you can plug the sd card right into your laptop... and prices on those cards are dropping fast... it's also slightly smaller, and you'll never have to worry about crashing the hard drive.

[Steve Nunez]

Can the mpeg2 footage they record be converted into another format for NLE use w/o loss in quality?

That's the real issue for me!

(can the camera's ".mod" files be renamed to mpg2 and readable on a Mac?)

[Zack Birlew]

Well, I dunno. Digital alternatives to tape are the future, but I'm not sure as to what will be ideal. Obviously, the first cameras to use this technology will be those little consumer cameras that are about the size of credit cards. My only issue is to what will happen with us, the big pro video group. Look, HDV is the new DV, all the features we want will eventually drip down (like 24p or full on progressive CCD's), but it brings up problems. HDV is 25mbps, right? Plus there's the chance that the HDV spec will be bumped up to 50mbps. Plus, HDV takes up a lot more space than DV. So the current media is going to have to get a lot faster (50mbps vs. 8.5mbps) and be able to hold a lot more (perhaps 10gb?).

I'm not too sure, I'm just rambling and making guesses. If I'm wrong, correct me, or rather, inform me on this subject a little more.

[Alex B Henderson]

it would be nice to have the cameras record in a format that can be DIRECTLY used by the NLEs without re-encoding (and re-compressing as a result).

Tape is a very good format that last a long time, stores itself, and doesn't die easily. Any move to a non-permanent storage format (like memory cards, hard disks, and the like) will also require real serious looks at backup and storage. The expense of going down that road makes these things currently less interesting.

Alex

[Dan Euritt]

both hdv and dv use the same 25 mbps bandwidth, so they take up the same amount of disk space... but decoding the hdv mpeg2 for playback is a lot more cpu-intensive than decoding dv footage.

there are numerous editors on the market right now that will work with dvd-bandwidth native mpeg2(under 10mbps) without re-encoding, but your typical editors will want to re-encode the entire mpeg2 timeline.

what i have done with the av100 is put it in race cars, then plug the footage into a dvd... unfortunately it's only 704x480 instead of the full 720x480, so most dvd authoring programs won't handle both sizes on the same disc, even tho both of those frame sizes are fully dvd legal... dvdlab pro will take 'em both, tho.

i resized with 2-pass procoder, and it looked pretty good, but what i'd really like is that mpeg2 plugin that premeire has... it's supposed to resize mpeg2 with no loss in picture quality.

one of the simple mpeg2 editors i've used is womble, but it's main claim to fame is that it'll only re-encode the transitions... i think that canopus has a full-on native mpeg2 editor that won't re-encode all of the footage??

[John Lee]

<<<-- Originally posted by Alex B Henderson : it would be nice to have the cameras record in a format that can be DIRECTLY used by the NLEs without re-encoding (and re-compressing as a result).

Tape is a very good format that last a long time, stores itself, and doesn't die easily. Any move to a non-permanent storage format (like memory cards, hard disks, and the like) will also require real serious looks at backup and storage. The expense of going down that road makes these things currently less interesting.

Alex -->>>

I agree. With memory cards and hard disks, I would always make a tape backup of my footage anyway, making the novelty sort of worthless.

I think an optical disk technology would work best. Maybe an HDVD disk that could hold about 120GB and record on the fly. That storage format would probably be even more durable than tape, easier to backup, and easier to load. Recording could be an issue, it wouldn't exactly be rugged.

Of course, that's probably at least a decade away... :-(

[Will Fastie]

Tape has better archival qualities than writable optical discs. Tape remains the prefered archival medium in the information technology world.

The thing that makes video tape such a pain is that capturing the tape to an editing station is a real-time process (one hour of video takes one hour of capturing). The lure of disk is that data can be copied at computer speeds.

The ultimate pro solution is hard disks at the camera, transfer to hard disks at the editing station, and archive to IT quality backup tape. The most contemporary tape drives are very fast, so recovery of footage from archive will be much faster than recovery of footage from the original video tape. These kinds of tapes and tape drives are rather expensive, so this isn't something for the everyday consumer, at least not yet.

Last year I had occasion to look at some tapes recorded with my original Sony Video 8 camera. Those tapes are fine. I also looked at some older manufactured CDs (i.e., stamped, not burned) that were younger than those old video tapes. A few of the CDs had started to deteriorate and could not be read.

It was the first time I came face-to-face with the mortality of CDs and it did not make me feel good about my large DVD collection. It is the dirty little secret of optical media.

[Harrison Murchison]

Tape has better archival qualities than writable optical discs. Tape remains the prefered archival medium in the information technology world.

Actually that's backwards. Tape is a poor archival medium if you're talking about 10+ years. It's magnetic media which means it's still susceptible to strong magnetic fields. Optical media is not as susceptible but it is more expensive.


I think Hard Drives are indeed the future and that the Japanese companies will do everything in their power to promote Flash Memory(panasonic) or optical blue laser(sony)

Hopefully some enterprising company will realize that hard drives offer far too much bang for the buck. They are reusable and can be replaced indefinitely. We'll see what happens. I don't have my hopes up for the large companies but maybe someone smaller will make that defining product.

[Will Fastie]

The world's data is archived on magnetic media. There is a lot of magnetic media that is more than 10 years old, much more.

Hard disk is magnetic as well. While magnetic force is a threat to any magnetic media, manufacturers and users have learned to deal with it. Average IT facilities take no more than mild precautions. The more critical the data, the more the storage facility is hardened.

About a year ago I transferred all of the data I had on 600 diskettes to CD-R discs. Some of the diskettes were 20 years old. I lost approximately 0.5% of the data due to media failure. Based upon my research, my CD-Rs will fail sooner. I have therefore planned a renewal four years hence in which I will copy the CD-Rs to new media.

Will