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Solid-State DV Camcorder
melorama writes "The NAB convention passed 2 weeks ago, and I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the really neat Solid State Video Camcorder that was unveiled by Panasonic. It seems a bit kludgy right now (it records onto a series of PCMCIA cards), but it definitely beats the klunky Avid/Ikegami Camcutter (aka Editcam) from several years back, which records onto a self-contained harddisk. This is certainly a blow to Sony, which is working on a camera acquisition system that uses a blue-laser optical disc (read: moving parts) technology."
And you're going to get ~30GB of storage how, exactly?
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The computer hardware and audio-video accronyms are crossing over, jeebus save us all.
Banaaaana!
that not only does the Sony camcorder use moving parts but that also any device in the past that involved burning discs sucked the juice fast and furiously
:)
get ready for 30 minute family outings, tops(hey....that doesn't sound that bad
..as cheap as the article presents it to be; why arent we using it in PC's? screw 32-meg usb-keydrives, i want a 4gb solid-state drive!
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What exactly would be wrong with a gigantiforous hard drive? This thing has 5 cards x 4 gigs each (max) for a max of 72 minutes.
Why not 60 gigs of HDD for 216 minutes? Or 120 for 432 minutes? For a consumer level camera, this seems more useful.
Imagine going on vacation and needing a bag of ($$$expensive$$$) PCMCIA cards to film with, or having to stop in the middle of a shoot to transfer 20 gigs of footage to a laptop.
A big enough HDD could just store all your footage, and you just point and shoot and dont think twice about it 'till you're back home.
I can see this being cool for professional cameras, as no doubt you can build a solid-state rig with better shockproofing, etc, etc..
But I doubt it can really become ubiquitous for home use - at least not until the spinning magnetic disc is replaced with solid state components.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I don't know how much a "blow" this will be to Sony, considering that the main reason for including moving parts (read: disks) is because of cost per unit of storage space, and not the cost of integration. I'm sure Sony could throw a solid state disk into their camera without much effort.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
With any type of real market, these prices should come down very nicely.
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From the article:
I couldn't see in the article, but does anyone know what actual codec they use? Is it the same DV codec that my Sony Digital 8 Camcorder uses?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
This idiot uses the term "wow product" like two dozen times in this cheezy PR piece.
... That along makes this a wow product."
"...saw my second wow product of the day"
"... the Tough-book (retailing at $4000) also has a touch panel screen
"...the Encore DVD software. It is a wow product"
"...that about wraps up my Super Wow day at NAB"
WOW!
NEATO WALLY!
That wraps up my super WOW post at slashdot.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I work at Panasonic's Inca Labs (the lab responsible for this product product).
Working as a tester on a a prior version of SS HDD, there were many reports of instantaneous memory losses. After much experimenting, these were ultimately diagnosed as a result of intertia change factor > 2.23G. The result was the HDD was trahed because it was highly suseptible to "memory loss" from daily usage.
I have since transferred to another team, and I don't know frankly, how much the product could have improved in a little over 10 months. I hope it is good enough to released in public, but, I seriously doubt the management had the patience to wait for a finished engineering product.
... probably not as much as Kazaa, however.
sulli
RTFJ.
When I was young, we had to get up at 2:00 am, have a hot cup of gravel, crawl to work on broken glass and when we got there, we had to record our video on granite CDs in which we carved the individual pits with our teeth.
I've figured the reason you don't see a HDD in a DV camcorder now is that they want to sell tapes. A 60GB laptop drive would take less space than the mechanism to drive, read and eject a DV tape, while holding the equivilant of 5 tapes worth of video. With a firewire connection to suck into your computer for editing or writing to your media of choise. Heck, a removable HDD would even work, though in theory you could download from the camcorder directly to a larger desktop drive.
Sony tries with their variations on optical, but I'm convinced that's just to sell media. That's the whole reason they invented the memory stick.
Solid State is just too expensive and/or slow to replace the HDD. If not, laptops would use it now in lieu of the spinning platter.
If the camcorder used a standard laptop drive, in theory it could be upgraded for mor capacity in the future, or even updated with a solid state version if/when they're feasible.
I think the idea of the Panasonic camera is good, but much like the editcam, I don't think it will do anything but fill the needs of hobbyists. The Sony camera that records to discs scares me too. Recording to a disc, what happens when I shake the thing? Does it skip?
Most professionals want durability and reliability. Most of these types of cameras, and some of the lower-end DV cameras, are good for hobbyists but I know I demand more (and I am a professional). Cameras like DV5000 from JVC are inexpensive and are solid pieces of equipment, but may not be for the geek. Automatic focus is something you will not find on most professional cameras.
I know that there have been some successes in the profesional world with this type of camera, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Almost all movies are still shot on film and most television stations and production companies demand something more durable than a disc based camera... and something more standard than a PCMCIA rig. Most places are still using BetaSp, even though Sony quit development a couple of years ago (please don't think I mean BetaMax). I believe this PCMCIA based camera will come and go much like the EditCam. Hopefully venders will realize that people like standards and that they get upset when "left out in the cold" with a product that no one else will support (see Digital 8mm). I think this not only holds true for professionals but hobbyists as well.
God bless this rant... and my karma.
Anyone serious about it is getting their tape in large boxes, not from Wal-Mart. miniDV tapes run about five bucks each.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
i'm just wondering why anyone would need a solid state camera?
for video, (which no one is going to watch faster than realtime anyway) tapes seem to be the best method yet since they are easily storeable, have less moving parts than hard disks, and have far more storage space (ratio wise) than solid state media.
The thing you're missing is that this records full resolution, 60 fields-per-second video with 48k/16 bit 2-channel audio. IOW, a REAL videocamera.
The biggest problem for recording to anything is the speed with which you can write. Relatively rugged/lower power consumption hard drives (notebook-type) max out at about 4000 rpms and about 1/20th of a terrabyte (desktop drives max out at about 10000 rpms and about 1/3 of a terrabyte). Flash memory seems to max out around 2 Gigabytes (at about $750+ a gig) and is much, much slower than hard disks, it also sucks juice when you write to it. While relatively small data transfers can be buffered by much faster RAM, neither of these is a really good option for high resolution, continuous acquasition, but the hard disk is much better. The solid state storage must be something different than Flash memory.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I was a Sony fan for a long time. Their video/VCR gear was always solid, functional and of exceptional quality.
In the past few years however they've really dropped the ball.
Their consumer-level camcorders are suffering the same rampant "featuritus" that their VCRs do and they've sacrificed good, solid reliable functionality for an incredible array of bells and whistles that really fill out a sales brochure but which your average user finds as useful as tits on a bull.
A couple of months ago I wanted a new top-end consumer camcorder (3CCD) and did a fairly comprehensive analysis of what was on the market.
Sony's offering was the DCRTRV950 which would have done the job, but thanks to the fact that they've loaded it up with "fluff" like Bluetooth and a myriad of other gee-whiz "features", it is very pricey for the basic functionality it delivers.
By comparison, Panasonic's MX500 is a brilliant camera. It has 3CCDs and all the really important high-end consumer functionality such as manual focus, zebra stripes, 3megapixel stills, etc. Just about the only feature I won't be using is the direct to MPEG recording that allows you to create MPEG files directly onto the memory card (but I'm sure many others will find this handy)
Here in New Zealand, the Sony DCRTRV950 is priced at around NZ$6K and even Sony's single CCD DCTRV50 has a list price of NZ$4299.
By comparison, the 3CCD Panasonic MX500 cost me under $3K, which meant I could afford some nice accessories to go with it.
Picture quality wise, the Sony and Panasonic offerings are very close -- the Sony having slightly better low-light performance -- but the difference is nowhere near worth paying double the price for.
I'm extraordinarily happy with my Panansonic's attitude of providing good, solid, basic functions at an affordable price.
So long as Sony continue down the path of placing more emphasis on sizzle than steak they won't see me buying any of their products anytime soon.
No consumer may "watch" video fast than realtime, although *I* do every single day...I'm a video editor. And as an editor, anything that eliminates the time wasted in digitizing video from source tapes is worth it. Digitizing lineararly in realtime is so "1990's", and its amazing that 90% of us in the video industry are still doing it. BetacamSX is an exception, but nobody but news and sattelite videogeeks use that format. Moving clips from the SSD as if it were nothing more than a file is exactly the way video editing workflows should work, in 2003.
I think we can all agree that this is not something that will revolutionize or even affect the consumer video space. But for professionals, it's a great start towards the elimination of tape as an acquisition format.
I've been saying all along that SIMMs are cheap (especially SDR- you probably don't need anything too fast). Just make a camera that has a number of SIMM slots (ruggedized, of course) and loops through the memory space. Then when you want to save anything, hit a button to actually save the last N minutes/megabytes/gigabytes to the PC Card, flag it as read-only for later downloading (to something like a 1394 hard drive... or video iPod :) and/or concurrently send it to the WAN-enabled server in the truck.
Yeah, if the battery dies then you've lost everything, but a small battery backup for the memory isn't that hard and with RAM- even DRAM and not SRAM- you're not drawing power as fast as you would be with HDD, flash, or optical so your main battery is going to last longer anyway. Okay, the storage mechanism probably isn't the biggest drain in the camera- the CCD and LCD are probably big power hogs.
I'd assume that for news reporters, most of the footage is shot and either edited in place or sent directly to the station for editing later. Yeah, a filesystem for saving and deleting takes would be helpful (if there isn't already one) and anything like RAM, flash, HDD, or optical are going to work well with that too. DRAM storage is optimal for the short, take-retake-send-straight-to-the-home-office usage pattern of news organizations.
You can already record an hour or so of VHS/VCD quality video onto a memory stick with sound with the newer Sony digital cameras. This thing isn't being targeted to people wanting to film their kids, but rather professional cinematographers/TV people.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The main reason technically speaking to keep tape is because it can withstand far far far greater G's than a hard drive. You can smash your camcorder on the sidewalk, and as long as the circuitry and gears didn't break, you can keep taping. With a hard drive, the fucker crashes on first glimpse of fall.
A camcorder with a hard drive in it is going to be more delecate, no matter how you look at it. Even if you used external FW hard drive in a backpack, you still can't be jumping up and down while using the camera.
Tape is the best media that is going to be available for camcorders in the near future. Until solid state flash chips become like CD-R in price, they aren't going to take off. Optical drives are going to kill battery life with the powerfull lazer, and the high speed motor.
What they really need to do is come up with some kind of smaller form factor tape spindles with higher density data storage. So you could fit the motors, reader/writer, and tape and everything in the size of a current 8mm cartrige.
The idea is this: which is cheaper, tape recorders/readers, optical recorders/readers, or magnetic disk recorders/readers? Tape is the answer. And its more durable under high Gs
I think the main drawback is its heat sensitivity being less than that of optical or hard drives or flash. But that is only a problem in certain climates.
I would suggest to not dismiss tape because its the 'old' kind of storage we used in the 80s and 90s. Tape is just a physical medium. We have been using disks even LONGER than tape (records)! New tape is good. It's digital. It's data redundant. It's low powered. It's high density. It's CHEAP. Don't let the misconceptions of tape being inferior because they are "old" technology slant your choice.
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It's really ignorant to equate 3 min clip on a digital camera to the superiority of true DV. That's like comparing a drive to Florida for 12 hours to a 2 hour plane ride. Sure, they both get you there, but it's a vastly different experience.
Even with a cheap-o MiniDV cam, it's lightyears ahead of any $2k digital camera can do, as far as moving pictures/sound quality goes.
I will admit that for some people, a digital camera is "good enough" for them, but don't bother to say it's good enough for everybody. This camcorder, for the professionals, is really a huge step forward. For the rest of us, hopefully this tech will trickle down in 5 years.
Or you could record as much as you want, then load it into iMovie and cut it down to a few minutes you want to keep and delete the rest. That way your 3 minutes don't run out in the middle of something you wanted to keep.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
that (like almost anything new shown at NAB), it isn't being released to the public yet -- not for at least another 10 months or so.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Who (even in the media field) wants to juggle five pcmcia cards? Obviously there's nothing too standard about them if they're made by panasonic for this and only this. Sure, the laptop reading capability is nice, but you could accomplish that with a larger solid state memory module that acted like a USB2/Firewire hard disk and probably accomplish faster datarates than pcmcia anyways without sacrificing the convenience of connectivity. Breaking up the video over cards sounds like a recipe for disaster since presumably they will have to be organized in order in and out of the camera.
I like the idea of a solid state data module, but five PCMCIA cards sounds like a horrible horrible mistake. Make it bigger and do the USB2/ieee1394 thing and have happier customers.
Brian