I had hoped to have purchased my first video camera in time for Franbert’s birth, but when I’d finally decided on the make and model I wanted, it was a camera that wouldn’t go on sale until after the birth: 15th June, to be precise.
I’ve chosen the JVC GZ-MC500. This is the world’s first 3 CCD camcorder that records to compact flash card or microdrive. There are great advantages to this over a MiniDV camera: immediate random access to data, no accidental recording over a tape, and MPEG-2 footage that needs no conversion on the computer to make DVDs. On the other hand, it’ll be important to copy off footage as soon as it’s taken, as it’s not very economical to keep a stack of CF cards or microdrives on hand.
I imagine we’ll keep this camera for many years, which is why I’m willing to spend a fair chunk of money on it. I really like the idea of not having to naff around with tapes, too. If only JVC would release it a month earlier.
Oh well; I guess we’ll just have to live with still photography for the first month. In the meantime, we can make a few AVI movies with our digital cameras and upload those to our gallery.
But the downside of standard MPEG-2 over MJPEG (DV) is that only changes to succesive frames are encoded. Which means you will lose quality and see some “mosaic” effects when you make an edit. In DV, every image is a JPEG on it’s own.
And you will edit, won’t you? Instead of making your friends and relatives sit through hours of raw footage!? 😉
Plus you can encode DV to MPEG4 in greater quality for people to download.
That said, I too would like the CF/MD idea better than tapes and it certainly is easier of you just want to capture memories in reasonable quality rather than create your entry to next year’s Sundance festival!
As for the storage problem, asuming they are just stored as files on a FAT32 file system you can use the same devices as used to portable photo storage to copy to a more economical medium than CF/MD.