Buying a Video Recorder - What you need to know
Buying a camcorder is a tricky business. Afterall this is an item of mechanics that you are going to trust your precious home videos and memories with. As such it often surprises me how many people just buy the cheapest model, or buy the 'latest one' without understand what makes it worthwhile.
For the professional/prosumer market there is an inundation of choice, and generally if you are looking at these models you should already know what you are after. For the average Mum and Dad consumer, however, the electronics landscape can appear vast. Consider this your map.
Media Type Originally Camcorders always used to film onto tape, the quality of the tape has improved in the consumer market over time from Hi8 to the current MiniDV tapes. In the last two years we have witnessed the development of two other kinds of camcorder, DVD recorders and HardDrive Recorders.
Many of the people who I talk to are excited about getting a DVD recorder. "Hey, the works already done, I shoot and I have a DVD." That is true, assuming assuming 1. You don't want to edit your footage and 2. You don't mind losing image quality.
For some reason many people seem to think that DVD is the best quality out there. Its partially understandable, in comparison to VHS the DVD is king. However, DVD's compress your footage in order to fit more onto the limited disc. I know this because I'm a film editor, once I've finished cutting a piece, I have to compress it to go onto a DVD, generally we compress the footage 60-75% of its original size. What this means for you, is that if you are shooting with low light, rapid movement or bright colours you run the risk of losing detail.
The other catch is the difficulty of extracting DVD information. A good 20% of my work is people bringing me DVD videos and asking if I can extract it so they can edit it. Simply put, to extract DVD footage well requires expertise and 3 independant programs. To do it poorly requires a download and clicking a button, but we don't want poor footage now do we?
HardDrive camcorders are a newer invention, putting a harddisk inside your camera and recording directly onto it. This is a good method, as long as you can download it onto your PC quickly. Otherwise things begin to clog up.
Ultimately I suggest buying MiniDV cameras. They're about the best quality tape you can get in the consumer market, and because they've been around for a while, you don't get annoying 'oversight' issues like the other formats.
Come back later for the subsequent parts of this article, if you have any specific questions you'd like answered feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you.
For the professional/prosumer market there is an inundation of choice, and generally if you are looking at these models you should already know what you are after. For the average Mum and Dad consumer, however, the electronics landscape can appear vast. Consider this your map.
These are my memories
Media Type Originally Camcorders always used to film onto tape, the quality of the tape has improved in the consumer market over time from Hi8 to the current MiniDV tapes. In the last two years we have witnessed the development of two other kinds of camcorder, DVD recorders and HardDrive Recorders.
Many of the people who I talk to are excited about getting a DVD recorder. "Hey, the works already done, I shoot and I have a DVD." That is true, assuming assuming 1. You don't want to edit your footage and 2. You don't mind losing image quality.
Don't let dark light affect your mood
The other catch is the difficulty of extracting DVD information. A good 20% of my work is people bringing me DVD videos and asking if I can extract it so they can edit it. Simply put, to extract DVD footage well requires expertise and 3 independant programs. To do it poorly requires a download and clicking a button, but we don't want poor footage now do we?
HardDrive camcorders are a newer invention, putting a harddisk inside your camera and recording directly onto it. This is a good method, as long as you can download it onto your PC quickly. Otherwise things begin to clog up.
Ultimately I suggest buying MiniDV cameras. They're about the best quality tape you can get in the consumer market, and because they've been around for a while, you don't get annoying 'oversight' issues like the other formats.
Come back later for the subsequent parts of this article, if you have any specific questions you'd like answered feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you.
