One of my colleagues asked for a recommendation for a digital video camera for the field. I recommended against getting a Mini-DV or HV camcorder and instead going all digital with a flash (SDHC) based camcorder:
These days, instead of using tape, I recommend going all digital. That way, you can simply dump the video files to your PC and don't have to bother digitizing them. You will need a large hard drive, but a 500 gigabyte pocket hard drive is cheap and fits in your laptop bag easily.
I recommend these models:
- Canon Vixia HF-10 or HF-100 (this is the one I use)
- Sanyo Xacti (small, handheld, the microphone isn't as good on this, but size is excellent)
Be sure to get a large SD card -- at least 4 gigabytes. Eight or 16 gigabytes is preferable.
Karen
Do you think this was good advice? Please post any suggestions or comments (or questions)!
It boils down to DV/HDV vs. AVCHD nowadays (with some crackpot cameras like the drool-worthy Toshiba Camileo using MJPEG AVI).
People need to understand the trade-off with AVCHD - lower file sizes, can be burned to a DVD as-is and read by a Blu-Ray player, but harder to edit and suffers from generation loss. At the very least prospective buyers need to know if their software supports AVCHD.
While I tend to agree with the idea of an easily copyable format that is very efficient in terms of storage, AVCHD seems to require a pretty heavy-duty processor to handle any kind of substantial editing/rendering. I tried out a Canon HF10 several months back and really liked the camcorder's performance, but couldn't handle waiting 20 minutes for a 30 second clip to render. As an ethnomusicologist who often records an entire concert's worth of material in a sitting, I simply can't imagine waiting hours for a one-hour performance, and away at a field site no less. Perhaps my computer is a bit outdated [a MacBook Pro (first generation) Intel Core Duo with 2GB ram] and therefore underpowered for the task. In the end I found an HDV-capable miniDV much more usable for hi-definition documentation. Not to mention the fact that in the digital file realm, one must have at least three simultaneous copies in order to be "backed-up" sufficiently. In a sense, the original tape allows me to have that should my other two digital copies become lost or unusable somehow.
Hmm... I find the processing time for AVCHD to be around 1:1 with my MacBookPro (latest model) and to be 10:1 with my Mac Pro desktop. What I don't like is that importing AVCHD usually results in an intermediary format that is much larger.
Still, I'm sold on all-digital right now.