HD Hard drive Camcorder...halp!

[Cybsled]

I'm in the market to upgrade my old High8 camcorder. The tech I have my eye on is the newer HD camcorders, but the ones that use harddrives for the recording. Lets assume I'm not going for the $2,000+ pro ones and want something in the 1200 and under range. What's the best out there? Opinions based on actual experience are a big bonus.

Thanks for the help

[Zarcath]

I usually recommend people stay away from Hard Drive cams. If you're shooting for a long period of time on location, once the HD fills up, that's it. Especially with a High Def hard drive camera. HD footage is about 25-30gb per hour, you could probably shoot for 1-2 hours before running out of space.

Also if i remember right, HDD and DVD cameras compress the video automatically to MPEG to save space. In my experience most editing programs work best with AVI, so you'd have to convert from MPEG to AVI for editting.

I'd look at getting a Canon HV30

[Lorrac]

You probably want something like Panasonic's P2 cams, but that's way over your budget.

edit: seriously, cheaper HD cameras tend to introduce noticeable artifacts... If you don't mind them, just pick a nice HDV camcorder, heard good things about sony's.

[Cybsled]

So you'd recommend DV over a hard drive overall in terms of recording medium?

[Zarcath]

Yes, MiniDV for recording medium. Especially if you intend to shoot a lot or for long periods of time. If you have a 2 day event, after day 1 (more likely after a few hours into day 1) the HDD will be full and you have downtime transferring everything off the camera and onto your computer. With tapes you just pop them in as you need it. They're convenient to carry and aren't necessarily fragile and you can keep them in your pocket, unlike DVDs.

If you're just thinking about using it for your kids birthday or some amateur porn, you could probably go with HDD storage. But if you're going to be doing a lot of shooting, MiniDV is really your only option.

You might want to read over this thread http://www.fohguild.org/forums/milli...mmaking-2.html

and decide if you really NEED HighDef or not.

[Cybsled]

The HV30 seem pretty solid. Only thing I'm kinda miffed at is I was planning on buying it from Dell, since I have a $200 gift card to them + they are chopping $150 off the price from a sale, but the fuckers wont ship it for 6+ weeks X_X

[Burf]

Originally Posted by Zarcath

If you're just thinking about using it for your kids birthday or some amateur porn, you could probably go with HDD storage. But if you're going to be doing a lot of shooting, MiniDV is really your only option.

This is the key part of this discussion. What are you doing with it?
I have a Sony CX-7 (it uses a Memory Stick Pro Duo) and I have yet to fill up an 8gb card. I put it on the second highest HD quality and it will do about 140 minutes-ish. On highest quality, it will do around an hour.

For me, the mini DV tapes are a pain in the ass because I don't feel like carrying them all around, I KNOW I'm not going to store them as "backups" and I don't want a room full of the things that I'm never going to touch again.

It records in H.264 and I connect the camcorder to my wife's iMac and hit "import all" and come back a bit later after it imports the data.

All the people bitching about how computers don't work well with the AVCHD format are probably going off info from when that compression format was first released. Those issues have been hammered out now and iMovie, Final Cut, Windows Movie Maker, etc all work fine with it.

I picked the Sony CX-7 because it's very small and light, takes very nice quality movies, and has no moving parts.

[Cybsled]

I'd be using Adobe Premiere.