The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Brilliant! I LOVE it. I'll help you with your pool anytime now that I know you pay with GOLD!

Hey - I'm wondering if anybody knows anything about camcorders ... this isn't so much about skills as much as knowledge. I'm trying to decide between tapes and hard drive - here's what I know.

Tapes require more maintenance and take longer to load onto your computer, requiring a firewire and some other things. However, the video quality is way less compressed, therefore looking better. As well, the tape offers you a guaranteed backup copy, so if your computer crashes, you still have all the original footage.

Hard drives require almost no maintenance and load footage faster onto the computer. However, picture quality is worse, and if you take it on an extended vacation, you could run out of space. If you don't have a laptop with you, there's nothing you can do about it.

Got any advice? I'll be grateful for any help, since I honestly don't know much about this stuff. The one that we're seriously considering is the Canon HV20.

How important is picture quality to you really if you're just going to use it to shoot vacation videos?

For Christmas I got a $79 flash memory camcorder that has surprisingly decent picture and sound quality and it's very easy to use. A 1gb flash card can store about an hour of video and then you just download it to your computer.

I used it to shoot a little documentary of my daughter doing a project for her science class and it came out fine. I wouldn't hesitate to use for vacation videos.

Tape-based analog camcorders are completely uncompressed. Digital camcorders (miniDV etc.) use DVC compression, which is consistent although lossy and personally I think it looks like ass. Flash and hard drive-based recorders have a wide variety of CODECs available, from assy and inefficient (such as MJPEG) to incredible (such as AVCHD). Most of the hard disk formats are easily edited on pretty much any computer-based video editing system, with the exception of AVCHD which is only just beginning to get supported in general (for example, the latest version of iMovie does but you have to run it on an Intel Mac for some reason - no PPC support at all).

A tape only offers you a guaranteed backup copy if you never reuse your tapes. Also, tapes tend to degrade over time and eventually wear out if you reuse them a lot. Tapes also don't have any sort of magnetic shielding on them while hard disks do. It's also easy to back up important recordings to DVD-ROM (as in, the original file burned to disc, not as in a disc playable in a standard DVD player).

Really, if you're concerned about losing your video files, you should also be just as concerned about losing everything else, like music and so on, and you really should be doing regular backups. Terabyte hard drives are cheap, and RAID enclosures are fairly inexpensive. Currently I'm rocking the Time Machine (a feature of the latest version of MacOS) which does a rather nice job of incremental backups. If my main drive fails I can just replace it and get everything back, and if my backup drive fails I only lose my history. There are of course other solutions out there for PC users as well.

I've got one of those cheapies that Steve mentioned, but I got it off ebay for about $30 (used, that includes shipping). If you're going to display all your video on the web, it's good for that too, because you generally don't use all your screen real estate.

We've got some Cannon Z series at work, and 2 out of the 3 have had problems, one with then the screen going bad and then not ejecting tape, one the sound went bad, and I've talked to several other people with the same camera and they've had tape ejection problems. So, my point is, this particular brand obviously has issues, but the tape mechanism is a finicky thing across all brands I'd imagine. I can imagine a hard bump can cause issues that SD card camera could withstand.

I probably wouldn't buy a tape camera if I needed another one. The SD ones are cheap and have no moving parts. I can see more makers moving to those (and the quality improving) as the cost per Gig of drops. Plus I can just pull the card and stick it in a reader and I'm good to go.

I'm planning on making music videos/weak sauce indie films with it, but I need the quality of picture to be good - I plan on putting the stuff on DVDs. If all I wanted it for was youtube, I would get HDD in a second. From what you said (fluffy), it sounds like the only hard drive format that has solid picture quality is incompatible with most hardware. Am I right?

Well, no, don't confuse "hard disc" with "high definition." Hard disc HD camcorders tend to use AVCHD, which you may or may not have software for already, and if you're on Windows at least it'll probably come with software you can use to convert it. HD camcorders are pretty expensive anyway (good ones still start at $800ish).

There are a lot of hard disc recorders which just record to SD formats, though, and all of the common SD formats are very widely-supported. HOWEVER, SD formats also vary widely in quality.

I think the best thing to do is to go to a site which reviews different video cameras and displays sample video clips. I don't know of any good sites for that, though.

I got the Canon ZR800 for the holidays and finally got around to using it to film my band play a show last week. It worked really well and I had a good time transferring the tape to my computer via firewire. It is cheap and from all the research I did, the best budget video camera.

If you just want something fun to shoot Youtoob stuff, check out Flip Video. Super easy to use and surprisingly good quality.

Ken

It's tough to find anything other than high def in the stores these days (from what I've seen while shopping). When I refer to HDD I'm talking about hard-disk/solid state (is there a difference?)

I checked out a few review sites, and they all say very different things. Some just attack Canon because the camcorder isn't pretty enough, and some love it. It's pretty confusing. Maybe I should check it on wikipedia.

ps - I watched a review for the ZR800 - not bad. It looks a bit flimsy though - does it feel cheap, or is it more solid than it looks?

There is a big difference between HDD and solid state. HDD actually records to a hard disk, while solid state records to flash memory. The primary difference is capacity - HDD has a lot more of it.

Amazon's pretty good for reviews, if you set it to show "most helpful first." Unfortunately their electronics selections can be a bit goofy.

Most of the camcorders I've seen in stores are still SD (meaning standard definition, not Secure Digital... too many acronyms are too similar now!). Are you sure you were seeing hi-def and not hard drive? (again, two different things called HD)

Reïst wrote:ps - I watched a review for the ZR800 - not bad. It looks a bit flimsy though - does it feel cheap, or is it more solid than it looks?

Yeah, it is really light weight, but the picture seems card good. It is really SUPER easy to use. I'll get the video transferred and uploaded sometime soon. You can check it out.

Ken

fluffy wrote:Amazon's pretty good for reviews, if you set it to show "most helpful first." Unfortunately their electronics selections can be a bit goofy.

I'll definitely check that out - the opinions of customers will probably be more helpful than the opinions of the companies themselves and the biased experts I've found on some sites.

fluffy wrote:Are you sure you were seeing hi-def and not hard drive? (again, two different things called HD)

Nearly every video camera I saw at every store was high def. When I say hard drive, I mean hard drive - there were high def minidv cameras and high def hard drive cameras.

ken wrote:Yeah, it is really light weight, but the picture seems card good. It is really SUPER easy to use. I'll get the video transferred and uploaded sometime soon. You can check it out.

I will. Could you upload it to somewhere other than youtube though? I'd like to see how good the picture quality is.

Oh, huh. I had thought MiniDV could only record SD, but I guess there's a lot of camcorders which actually do record an HD format to MiniDV. Well then.

I think the most important thing is to balance your use cases with the various media costs and so on. If you want to continuously record for multiple hours, hard drive is your best bet. If you want to record, say, an hour at a time, and want to be able to cheaply add a lot of storage to record to, MiniDV is probably your best bet. If you want to easily transfer your recordings to your computer and don't care about having a lot of storage, flash is your best bet.

fluffy wrote:I think the most important thing is to balance your use cases with the various media costs and so on. If you want to continuously record for multiple hours, hard drive is your best bet. If you want to record, say, an hour at a time, and want to be able to cheaply add a lot of storage to record to, MiniDV is probably your best bet. If you want to easily transfer your recordings to your computer and don't care about having a lot of storage, flash is your best bet.

That's really helpful. Thanks! Hour at a time sounds best for me at this time, but I'll let the facts stew in my mind for a day or so.

Well, double-check how much time you can record on a tape first. I know SD MiniDV can record about an hour per tape (that's what I currently have) but HD might be different. It looks like HD MiniDV uses a different kind of tape, which could just be longer or might be higher-density or something. I haven't really kept up.

I checked a couple of days ago, and it seems like 60 min is the standard for HD.

Okay. Make sure you read the fine print though - often a stated tape capacity is at the lowest quality.

Alright - I'll watch for that. I've been noticing that a lot of people recommend the Sony HDR HC7 as well. It seems a lot more ergonomic, but the USB port isn't even USB 2.0. So the video upload will be slow (as par with all minidv), and the picture upload will be slow too. Hmm. It seems better than the Canon ... but ... nobody at the stores even mentioned it. I wonder if it's even sold anymore.

if i've learned one thing from this thread - it's to never talk to fucking australians.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:

©aravan®ay wrote:

©aravan®ay wrote:...but none of this helps my pump. It's cactus.

It is indeed cactus. Or completely rooted may be the correct term

The pool dude was just here. The impellor shaft had sheared. Need a new pump.

If the shaft thread has stripped, you need a new motor (dry end). If the impeller has spun, you need a new impeller (wet end). But needing a whole new pump is your choice, not the pool dudes choice. A new pump means re-plumbing a whole new pump.
There are advantages to getting a whole new pump.
#1. A manufacturer warranty
#2. More energy efficient if the old pump is over 5 years old (this may only be a U.S. thing)

BUT, a new pump is 3 or 4 times more expensive than just replacing the bad parts.

Another bit of info. It's very rare for a motor shaft to strip the threads. Motor shafts are case hardened stainless steal. Now, impeller threads strip easy, they are brass. With that said, ask the guy to show you the motor when he does the work. I'll guarantee the motor shaft is perfect.
.

(...I didn't see this post before)

No - the shaft had actually sheared - broken in half - it wasn't any thread stripping. Anyway, the bloke whipped the old pump out and put a new one in that afternoon. Cost about $500. Even if it was fixable - I doubt any repair dude would even get out of bed for much less than that (and it was more that 7 years old)

blue wrote:if i've learned one thing from this thread - it's to never talk to fucking australians.

Go to bed Blue - it's 3:30 am and you're getting cranky

It was only 12:30 his time.