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JVC First With A HD-Based Consumer Camcorder
kamesh writes "David Pogue writes in nytimes.com 'The days of storing computer data, music collections and Hollywood movies on spools of tape will soon be completely gone....JVC is the first company to see that particular light. Next month, it will release its new Everio GZ-MC100 and GZ-MC200.' Are tape based camcorders destined to die soon?"
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftech2. nytimes.com%2F2004%2F11%2F25%2Ftechnology%2Fcircui ts%2F25stat.html&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 &client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:offici a/
http://seanism.com/
A D-VHS tape can store about 44 gigabytes. You don't want to know how much money it costs to do that in solid state memory. It looks like the D5 tape standard uses 140GB/hour.
IMO, it is pretty curious that this HD camcorder doesn't use it, as JVC is trying to promote D-VHS, they own the VHS and D-VHS standards.
How is JVC first when i spotted my eye on this 4MP Sanyo several months ago! (it was RELEASED on september 10th!)
I'm always suspicious of companies that claim 'first' status. Are there any other companies which beat JVC out the door on this?
Is it? That depends. How much is a 500 Gb tape backup system going for nowadays? I have about a thousand gigs of storage on my home network: how much would it cost me to back that up to tape? Sure, the cost per bit of tape is lower than hard disk (although the disparity isn't as great as it used to be) but the barrier to entry is much higher: high-density tape drives aren't cheap. So, from a corporate perspective (where there are substantial IT funds to invest in up-front hardware costs) tape makes a lot of sense: over the life of the drive the savings offered by the use of inexpensive tape are worth it. For small offices and home users a removable hard drive probably makes more sense for backup purposes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Between DRM and Wireless "Censor Chips"(*), the old tape may be of more utility for some time to come!
* - A feature where wireless signals from the Police, Army, etc. will tell advanced Camcorders to stop recording! It will be touted as a way to increase privacy, but can also ensure governments protect their dirty work from being recorded!
DV is compressed, too. MPEG-2 I-frame only is the same type of video compression as DV uses, just in a different wrapper.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
You should take a look at HFS+ Fragmentation.
After six months of use, the average fragmentation was under 1% for 5 different types of users. I know, I know, this is on a Mac. But I'm sure there are other modern file systems that don't fragment, such as ext3 or reiser. I just haven't looked it up.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
Get an old video recorder, the older the better. You're looking for a seperate motor for each drive, top loader if possible, with a metal deck. Remove the top cover.
Glue two cotton makeup removing pads (the kind *without* moisturiser, just dry cotton pads) or something similar to two pieces of wood. Arrange them so they squeeze the tape gently.
Wind the tape backwards and forwards a few times, and the gunk will get wiped off the tape. If they are really bad, change the pads between each pass. Periodically hoover the mouldy gunk out of the machine.
If there is something really stubborn on the tape, soak two pads in alcohol, arrange a big long drying loop (you may need to remove the head block) with a fan to blow dry it, then two "dry" pads for a final wipe.
This works, and works well.
I haven't RTFA yet (JVC is politely yet firmly denying any connection attempts) but this really seems like a big woofing dog IMHO.
I do a lot of videostuff (documentaries, inane little comedies, etc etc) on a semi-professional basis and this really has no appeal to me.
First off, tapes are very robust. They can take a lot of damage and still be usable. Harddrives are not very robust (at least not in the same way as tape). Also, a camera without replacable storage is in my opinion worthless, especially when it's a fragile harddrive. Tapes are also very cheap (I buy my DV-tapes for about US$2 a piece)
Tape-based DV-cameras are very flexible, and this nonsense about JVC putting editing functions on this camera seems completely pointless to me. Editing should be done on an editing-platform (Mac/Final Cut, or whatever floats your boat). Editing capabilites on a camera is a "feature" that no one will use, since it's likely to be crap.
I don't want a camera that I have to be worried about breaking the storage in. I most assuredly need a camera with replacable storage, since when I'm off shooting a documentary I have no idea as to how much space/tape it will use. Having to limit myself to whatever JVC feels is the norm is completely pointless.
This whole thing seems to me to be a case of "can we make a harddrive-based camcorder? YEAH! is it of any use? NO, but lets do it anyway because there's always morons who want some new toy!"
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Yes, DV is also a compressed format, although it uses FAR less compression than MPEG does.
Most importantly is that it does not do difference frame encoding, each frame is compressed completely independently of all others. DV is basically a Motion JPEG variant. Not the most efficient compression algorithm, but good if you need to edit your video since you can split the video at any frame. (As opposed to MPEG, which requires you to recompress the video if you want to split anywhere other than a keyframe.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
DVD is higher quality than DV
No. DV is higher quality because it's not compressed as much. DV is like MPEG-2 with I-frames only. DVD is MPEG-2 with a series of I-, B-, and P-frames. The B- and P- frames compress better than I-frames only, but lose quality.
DVD can reach higher qualities IF you use high bit rates and spend a LOT of computation time to compute the B- and P-frames. But a camera that has to stream to hard disk in realtime is NOT going to be able to put that kind of horsepower into computing the intermediate frames.
At a given bit rate, and with the kind of electronics in a camera, DV is going to be higher quality and simpler to produce.
DV has a post-processing advantage over DVD in that, because it's I-frames only, it's easier to edit in a program like Premier.
MPEG2 or MPEG4 could be stored at a higher resolution for the same data rate and would look dramatically better.
DV and DVD both use the same resolution, 720x480. As for data rates, you just can't compare DV and DVD. DV operates at a higher data rate than DVD was ever intended to. Contrariwise, DV can't realistically operate at the low data rates of DVD. DVD and DV operate at different ends of a data-rate vs compute-power tradeoff.
At their best data rates - DV's typical 25 megabit per second, vs DVD's max MPEG-2 rate of about 9 megabit, their quality is comparable, and very very good. I find that DV always looks better than MPEG-2 at DVD specs, but DVD can get very close.
MPEG-2 I-frame only has no defined bitrate to it; it can be 25MBit/s (which leaves the quality identical to DV), 50MBit/s (identical picture quality to DVCPro) or higher. DV is normally run at some multiple of 25MBit/s (so DV is 25MBit/s, DVCPro is DV at 50MBit/s etc).
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Well, if you are getting painfully technical about it, that is, barely, true.
However, while all filesystems may fragment data, most good ones are easily able to keep the fragmentation down under 1%.
My own BSD system is using FFS (UFS). I just checked, and my home partition is under 0.0% fragmentation, even though it's 90% full, and my most fragmented filesystem is nearly-full
With a video camera, the same filesystems could rather easily keep the fragmentation down under 0.001%. Technically fragmented, but nominally so.
I wish I knew what was going through the minds of the mods that marked this insightful.
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