But then how are you archiving your AVCHD footage and what's it costing you to do that? With HDV it's a few bucks for an hour's worth of storage on tape, and other than burning to DVDs I can't think of a cheaper way to archive AVCHD...?

4 GB is about an hour of video, depending on the compression you choose; about 40 minutes at 13 Mb/s, comparable to HDV-quality. A DVD5 costs about 50 cents these days.

So you're saying AVCHD is roughly half the bandwidth of HDV for a comparable level of quality, meaning half the archiving cost using any given form of storage. But if you're figuring about 75 cents to archive an hour of good AVCHD footage compared to $5 for a decent miniDV tape, then archiving 100 hours of AVCHD on 150 DVDs will save you ~$425 compared to saving the same amount of HDV on tape. Now figure your time required to burn 150 DVDs and multiply by how much you value your time per hour, and that cost savings disappears compared to simply tossing HDV tapes in a drawer. It's basically a tradeoff of time versus money, at least until flash memory gets cheap enough to use as permanent storage.

Don't know how it would take more than a few minutes per to burn discs, and I'd think capture time from tape on the front end would make the time factor a wash anyway, but I'm just telling you how much it costs. If you're happy with tape, stay with tape.

I havent estimated archiving to discs yet but the fact 50% of what I shoot I actually use in editing ( which can be edited on site with the push of a few buttons in ACVHD) which brings up another plus of ACVHD, how much head wear does viewing, capturing,cleaning, pro cleaning, replacing, add up to but I know I never paid a "couple bucks" for pro tapes or even cheapo tapes @ Best Buy or Circuit City. Maybe I shopped at the wrong places but I know I never had the guts to keep recording over tapes due to an anal feeling about quality loss.

I have went back and tried to re edit some 2 year old tapes to find they were damaged as well, not good in a couple circumstances.

I did a search and it appears DV tapes are pretty cheap but I trust those as much as the cassette tapes of the 70s and 80s

In my time, capturing from tape to HD cost hundreds of hours if only capturing needed material. Theres so many things right with ACVHD ( playing on a 1080i/p HD source being very strong mixed with 5.1 DD, Blue Ray, HD-DVD which I am doing now with stunning results)


In the first 30 minutes of shooting ACVHD I wiped all my experimentation away in 1 second, in my second 30 minutes it took about 20 seconds to dig through and delete more footage un needed ON SITE, A person good at shooting what they want and skipping the garbage could possibly import to timeline with a finished product in the field by instantly deleting garbage quickly

No need to convince me! I've been tapeless for a while now.

Dang internet and my horrible syntax, I was agreeing and adding to your examples!

What are you using to edit and such? Can you mix HDV and ACVHD and rip to MPEG2 480P discs for family and friends that dont own HD DVD and HDTVs?

Good point: it's basically the same time required to set up a bulk HDV capture from tape as it is to burn a DVD for archiving AVCHD footage. So assuming we call the time factor a wash, the cost of HDV tapes is something worth considering over time. I wouldn't call that significant unless you shoot a lot of footage, but it's one factor to consider.

I use Vegas, which has been generally great for mixing/matching anything (though rather Sony-centric lately) -- and if you can get it on the timeline, you can get it to DVD.

I haven't shot HDV for a while; I generally use the HVX200, so I'm shooting P2/DVCPRO. Vegas doesn't support it natively, so I use the Raylight plugin.

I wouldn't call it a wash; you can burn the data to disc considerably faster than the real time (1 sec/1 sec) required for capture, not figuring in logging time if you do that. But yes; it's a factor among many to consider.

Just to keep the workflow differences in perspective, with HDV you can bulk capture an hour of footage with a few seconds of setup time and let the software separate your clips, at which point you're basically where you would be with AVCHD after copying your source files to a hard drive. There's no need to sit and watch an HDV capture occur, just as you probably wouldn't sit around waiting while burning AVCHD footage to a DVD. The advantage of AVCHD is time saved up front if you want to view your clips quickly; the advantage of HDV is time saved later on by not having to worry about archiving your footage before erasing your memory cards. Any logging time is a wash between formats, since viewing video takes the same amount of time regardless of where it comes from.

View clips quickly and delete garbage instantly so as to not bring the garbage to post and have more room for more clips.

Viewing is viewing most certainly but archiving half ( or capturing half) from the field is incredibly useful and FAST. When I first got my ACHDV I messed around for several hours and basically erased it all in about 2.45 seconds. Not being a pro shooter makes ACVHD so much more useable

A fair point, but I'd be nervous about being able to erase so much work so easily. What's the process for locking AVCHD clips so they can't be erased, and is there a way to do that for an entire memory card without doing each clip individually?

Im still kinda playing around and dont have a serious project until I confirm Vegas can deal with this stuff but from my experience so far is that you can do pretty much anything you can do with say a NLE on the screen. start and stops are seperate thumbnails and I think those can be cut within themselves. Regardless, being an amatuer I consistantly film small clips I know are worthless almost instantly, mainly when using my crane, steady cam or dollie. For me, crane shots usually take 4-10 tries to get what I like. Ive got hours and hours of this " crap".

My sons Prom was the night I got my cam so I was shooting him, his girlfriend and their friends as well as shooting all sorts of other tests while waiting around ( moving car, nature, deer, sunny sky etc. etc.) when done I hooked it up to my 1080P HDTV via HDMI and just watched the entire thing ( and was blown away compared to my old HDV cam, when finished I brought up the menu and hit delete and it had all/none/selective and I just pushed all thumbnails but the Prom shots and it was done in 2-3 seconds.

I thought I skimmed the manual and saw where you can do many different types of goodies locally on the HD.

Later that night I DLed Nero and put some clips of my reef tank together and burned it in HD to a normal disc on my laptop that played HD via my Blue Ray......I was sold