Any advice on Prosumer HD Video cams?

We are looking to buy some HD camera for future shoots, but wondered if anyone has actual experience with any of them, or even a good review site to trust. thanks, Mike M

Honestly dont know, maybe you could shoot a PM over to GayBucks_Chip i think he knows something about HD cameras :)

Regards,

Lee

I have the Sony Z5
and I love it

Check out the Panasonic HMC-150. It uses SD flash memory cards (like in digitial still cameras) instead of tape. That means no moving parts, nothing to wear out or get dirty, light weight because there's no tape transport mechanism. Instead of transferring video to a computer by firewire or USB cable, you just pop out the SD card and pop it into your computer (unlike tape where 1 hour of video normally takes 1 hour to transfer).

Some people will say tape has proven shelf life for long term storage, unlike SD cards. True, but even tape will degrade over time. It's also bulky, has no random access if you just need to find a segment of a shoot. You can use your computer to copy an SD card to another SD card, RAID storage drives, or the pocket-size 500 GB drives that now sell for under $100. So you could easily make 2 offsite copies plus 1 in-office copy and still have the original SD card, in just minutes. And nobody knows yet, the history is still too shortbut it's quite possible the solid state memory (SD cards) may prove to have an extremely long shelf life as well.

Let's see, a 500 GB portable drive will hold roughly 100 hours of HD footage. That's equal to 31 SD cards of 16 GB each. Also equal to 100 DV tapes. The 500 GB drive or the 31 SD cards will fit in my pocket (or a very small safe deposit box in a bank for security). 100 DV tapes will not. SD cards are getting higher in capacity and lower in cost also, so probably in a year we'll see 64 GB cards (12 hours of HD footage) available at a reasonable price.

I could copy the entire 31 SD cards to a computer for editing or to the 500 GB portable drive for storage in a couple of hours. I could copy the 100 DV tapes to other tapes for backup storage in 5 days if I worked 24 hours per day.

Just the recording medium makes it an easy sell to me. But add in the camera's professional features, quality of the video footage, etc. and it seems like the best bang for the buck.

http://www.videomaker.com/article/13710/

http://digitalcontentproducer.com/ca...ic_aghmc_1108/

Kevin

if you can get an hour of HD video - or even standard video - on an SD card, that means the video is pretty compressed. a one-hour uncompressed standard video on mini DV is like 20 gig.

A 60 minute standard def DV tape will result in a file size of roughly 13 GB and uses DCT compression which is inherently pretty "lossy". Panasonic and some other HD cams (including tape, SD, and hard disk types) use AVCHD as their compression codec. AVCHD is one of the 3 codecs selected for use in Blue Ray discs, which gives you an idea of the amazingly high quality of its image. It's still compressed, like every other video format, but the codec is so advanced that you can get a file size smaller than standard def DV yet it's double or triple the image quality.

The biggest drawback to AVCHD (and other HD codecs/formats) is that they require a lot of processing power. Editing AVCHD will bring a computer to its knees unless it's bucked up with quite a lot of RAM and a multiple core processor. But it's worth it, one look at something shot in AVCHD will turn just about anyone into a fan.

Nice thing with the SD cards is that some LCD/plasmas can accept them and play back the AVCHD files directly without having to do any editing. Very nice for an immediate giant screen preview of your work.j Some Blue Ray players will also accept SD cards and usually play them back with no problem, since AVCHD was originally designed as a Blue Ray format.

Kevin