Hard Drive or Tape?

John Hudson

John Hudson

EF4
Joined
Jan 11, 2006
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Location
Winnipeg, Manitoba
I want to upgrade to a new camcorder, and have grown really fond of the convenience and small size of the hard drive camcorders. I'm not sure, however, how suitable they'd be for "rough duty", in particular being mounted on my dash or windshield and taking a pounding on less forgiving roads.

Have heard that the vibration will cause havoc with the drive protection mechanism, and result in lost frames or equipment failure.

Any thoughts?

John
 
I would personally stay away from hard-drive based cameras, particularly for chasing. Too many reliability and logistical problems for that type of use. MiniDV tape-based cameras still give the best value and performance for the money.
 
My interest is pointing to solid state cameras as technology is advancing. One trend in particular that interests me is the new SD card cameras. NLE's arent yet up to par but will be soon for the new HD compression ratios.

As for now miniDV is hard to beat. I personally recommend ( whatever that is worth ) is the gs400 - 500 from Panny for a consumer camera that will get you up to par with quality broadcast footage.
 
John Hudson said:
However, if miniDV is indeed more reliable, I've absolutely no problem with that, since they're more reasonably priced.
Click to expand...
As long as there aren't magnets around magnetic tape would be more tougher in such "high mobility" environment as stormchasing.
Considering operating tolerances it's wonder that HDs can tolerate as much as laptop HDs are claimed to withstand.

Also there's this archiving/backup side. If you're on long chase you would need to have either laptop with very big HD or with external HD for emptying camera. And what about after that? Data is still on physically fragile media (one wrong bump and...) and practically impossible to backup considering capacity of inexpensive/easy to use removable medias. (and content mafia has even delayed coming of BluRay which could give somewhat usable capacity)
Again with miniDV you'll just put full tape to camera bag and it survives anything except nearby magnet or excessive heat.



fplowman said:
My interest is pointing to solid state cameras as technology is advancing.
Click to expand...
And then marketing clowns are even screwing up that by going to "Sucks Digital".
This overhyped media sexy SDHC ("high capacity"... and pigs have wings) just happens to be limited to 32GB while even original 13 years old Compact Flash standard goes directly to 137GB limit of parallel ATA (aka IDE) bus.... which wasn't much problem in computer side.
Also data bus structure of CF interface makes it extremely versatile, any new memory technology can be directly used by just using right memory controller in CF card.
(and neither "electric engineer in me" likes bare contacts of SD which are just like made for receiving ESD)
 
Again with miniDV you'll just put full tape to camera bag and it survives anything except nearby magnet or excessive heat.
Click to expand...

Actually, I threw a Digital8 tape in my trunk one day, forgot it there and then put my big Wilson 1000 magnet in the trunk on top of the tape by accident, there was a sheet of paper covering the tape.

Two days later I came back to look for the tape and found it under the magnet. I thought the tape was a write-off but it was perfectly fine. I am not sure how much damage was done to the tape, but I made an exact backup with the digital8 machine at work since I did worry that one day in the near future I would play the tape to see garbled patches of garbage.

Therefore I have concluded digital8 tapes are indestructible. I have digital8 tapes that are older than some DVD's and they still work without issue while the DVD are being eaten by bacteria.

This does make me wonder though? I don't know if you can answer Esa, but why did miniDV become so popular for HD ? To my knowledge both D8 and miniDV use the exact same codec except the tape run time for D8 is a little longer over standard miniDV.

I was thinking it could be because standard DV is popular in the professional market as professional devices support both standard and mini tapes, so it was just easier to sell devices which support HDV on mini dv tapes as opposed to digital8. Would my assumption be correct?

Also, I do think the HD consumer market has been short sold, pro tapes are superior in quality to minDV tapes and I would be willing to buy a prosumer device which supported pro tapes. HD stills from pro tapes look crips and clear, almost like digital photos while they are much more fuzzier on miniDV tapes.

Anyway, beta tape is not dead, long live BETA!!!:D
 
Tom Stefanac said:
Actually, I threw a Digital8 tape in my trunk one day, forgot it there and then put my big Wilson 1000 magnet in the trunk on top of the tape by accident, there was a sheet of paper covering the tape.
Two days later I came back to look for the tape and found it under the magnet. I thought the tape was a write-off but it was perfectly fine.
Click to expand...
There's couple things which come to my mind, magnetic field of attaching magnet could be contained to short distance of it (like that of toroidal transformer), also stationary magnetic field disturbs magnetic particles less than moving magnetic field. (remember how magnet is used to make magnet from piece of iron, or to reverse process)

I have digital8 tapes that are older than some DVD's and they still work without issue while the DVD are being eaten by bacteria.
Click to expand...
I have some eight years old CD-Rs which give nearly perfect C1/C2 scan results so optical medias can definitely last much longer than what some claim.
D8 uses at least one error correction level so there's propably always various amounts of errors.

This does make me wonder though? I don't know if you can answer Esa, but why did miniDV become so popular for HD ? To my knowledge both D8 and miniDV use the exact same codec except the tape run time for D8 is a little longer over standard miniDV.
Click to expand...
I think this gives some answers for that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital8

And in case of HDV codec is different from normal DV. Without using more efficient codec (interframe MPEG2) it would be impossible to store ~4x information of HDTV video to same space.
 
Well you could alway go with the tape setup then get a firestore or hard drive setup later to plug into your fire wire port but there not cheap.
 
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