Camcorders SD or HD (Sony, tape, record, movies)

[trlhiker]

Ok, I am in the market for a new camcorder. Am going on vacation to Alaska soon and want to get a new camcorder. Should I spend the extra $150 to get a HD one over an SD? Is it really worth it. I like the sony's and have been looking at those in particular. Also should I get one with internal memory or just external? Your thoughts? Thanks.

[Adric]

If you're going to be viewing the footage on an HDTV, I would probably spring for the HD cam. That's just me though.

[thecoalman]

SD is pretty dead at this point. Get HD if you can.

As far as memory goes there are a few things to consider, as far as quality goes last I checked tape was still king but the video used on flash cards is approaching it. You can fit 14GB of data on one $3 mini-DV tape. They record at a higher bitrate than the flash based camcorders. The video is also easier to work with in editors. One downside is transfer to your compute is done in realtime so if you have one hour of video it's going to take you one hour to transfer it.

Another thing to consider is that once the flash card is filled up you either need to transfer it to a computer or have another very expensive flash. With tape you can juts pop another tape in. With flash you're recording time is very limited. I have two 6 hour batteries for my camcorder so I'm good for 12 hours in the field.

I really like tape because it forces me to keep a backup, once a tape is recorded I transfer it to an external hard drive for easy access from computer. The tape gets sent to a relatives house for safe storage as a backup.

As an aside I see many of the better still cameras are offering the same recording capability of camcorders. In the past video on still cameras was really poor for anything but a novelty. That is not the case now, they are using full quality video comparable to regular camcorder.

My brother picked up a Canon HV20 about 2 years ago and it has worked great, current model is HV40.

Canon | VIXIA HV40 High Definition Camcorder | 3686B001 | B&H

A good place to check for reviews is Camcorders - Independent Camcorder Reviews, Ratings & Comparisons

[trlhiker]

Ok so my next question is, I have a computer with 4GB of memory running windows Vista. Is that enough for HD videos to view and edit or will it be too slow? Thanks.

[hoffdano]

I think there are a few other considerations. The HD movies will be big (in terms of file size). You will soon be adding hard drive space to your computer. A 500 GB hard drive will disappear in a hurry if you shoot a fair amount of video.

Editing video on a computer requires cpu power and memory. 4 Gb is probably enough - but what kind of processor do you have? Rendering video will completely saturate the PC. I have an overclocked quad core Intel Q6600 with 4Gb and it is an excellent SD video editing machine.

If you plan to do a lot of video editing, I would consider installing 64 bit Windows 7. It is faster than Vista, and allows you take advantage of more than 4 Gb of memory.

Finally - remember that if you don't use tapes, your computer will have all of your video. If your hard drive fails you lose your video files - unless you back them up periodically.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by hoffdano

I think there are a few other considerations. The HD movies will be big (in terms of file size).

Actually DV and HDV are about the same, both record to tape at 25/mbps and take up the most space which is around 14GB per hour. Note that DV is lightly compressed and would be the easiest to work with.

SD camcorders that record to DVD, Flash or hard drive use MPEG2 which is variable, you can figure about 4GB per hour using 8/mbps.

HD Camcorders using flash I believe are around 12 to 15 mbps, the codec they use compresses the video more than HDV so it will require more CPU resources to edit.

[MikeJaquish]

Don't forget to consider the lens.
Many camcorder lenses are not wide-angle enough to offer a good shot in inside spaces.
Maybe not an issue in Alaska, but still something to consider for other use.