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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?"
It seems silly beyond belief that these JVC camcorders don't support Macs. Something like this would have wide appeal to the Final Cut Pro crowd...
:)
hmm... someone need to make a mac friendly one of these with
an iPod dock to use iPod mini's as the removable hard drive
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
The hard drive is too small for me.
If I go on a trip, I want to minimize the amount of stuff I have to lug around... and when I'm on vacation, I don't want to carry a laptop around just so I can dump my footage.
Gimme at least 120gb and then I'll start being interested.
As is so common in mainstream tech writing, the article completely misses the point. They claim that because the camera can use microdrives (compact flash based hard drives) that it is somehow comparable to the ipod. I don't usually consider 4gb equivalent to 40 gb , 60 gb, or whatever the ipod (and other high cap music players) max capacity is now.
To me, the real advance would be a camcorder that used a 60gb (or larger) hard drive like the ipod and directly recorded mpeg2 or mpeg 4. I don't need the thing to be microscopic, it has to be big enough to hold and have a decent battery life. Obviously it would need firewire of USB2.
Does anyone have a camera like that coming?
The problem with a harddrive based solution is that most people want replaceable media in a film (as well as photo) cameras.
Unloading the drive to free up space just isn't good enough. Not everyone carries a notebook around and I know I'd hate to loose my previous work just because something interesting happend just now and the disk is full.
But with easily replacable standard disks - sure thing!
I gotta keep complaining about how much JVC just doesn't get it. I've been waiting forever for a HD camcorder, but this thing is a dog. Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops. Keep it simple and elegant and eliminate all of the little thumb buttons and crazy menus within menus within menus that makes most digital camcorders and cameras such a drag to use.
And no viewfinder! What are you going to do on a sunny day when the LCD is all washed out... shoot in a random direction?
For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
The idea that there are filesystems out there that don't fragment is a myth. No matter how file storage is done, there is always a chance for data which needs to be loaded in sequence to be scattered over the disk which would make loading very non-optimal as the disk head would have to move all over the place.
Now, fragmentation isn't exactly a big problem for video storage. You're dealing with few, large files being written to disk in a linear fashion.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
A tape is like $4, find me 4GB hd's for that price and I'll carry a few.
That said, anyone know the lifetime on mini-dv tapes? Is it better than on optical media (dvd-r specifically). I'm trying to decide how best to archive video of my child. DVD is great for watching but I fear that some day I'll pop it in the machine and it will be dead.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
As is so common in mainstream tech writing, the article completely misses the point. They claim that because the camera can use microdrives (compact flash based hard drives) that it is somehow comparable to the ipod. I don't usually consider 4gb equivalent to 40 gb , 60 gb, or whatever the ipod (and other high cap music players) max capacity is now.
it's comparable to the ipod mini
To me, the real advance would be a camcorder that used a 60gb (or larger) hard drive like the ipod and directly recorded mpeg2 or mpeg 4. I don't need the thing to be microscopic, it has to be big enough to hold and have a decent battery life. Obviously it would need firewire of USB2.
gee... the author says the same thing... right at the top of the article he talks about how much video a 60 GB iPod could hold.
It's amazing that you can conclude the article misses the point, when you clearly haven't read it.
Wow, tricky one! I can see dee problem. Can anyone see dee solution. Is the total less than 700 MB?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I can see HD camcorders catching on only if the memory is removable. That way, you could switch between multiple hard drives (think hot-swappable drive bays on 1" drives or something).
Tape may be a big hassle in many ways, but at least it provides theoretically unlimited storage? A tape fills up? Just pop in a new one! However, if you have a fixed HD, even if it can store many hours of video, eventually you will max out the capacity. There always needs to be room to upgrade the storage.
Think about it: you don't see decent-quality digital still cameras with embedded memory only do you? Even if you embedded 512MB or 1gig into a digital still cam, *somebody* would still eventually hit that limit. Therefore, having a CompactFlash (or whatever) slot allows for future expansion. I can't see a video camera lacking similar capabilities attaining any level of success.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
I can only put an hour of recording on it? no thanks.
Plus I can gte(just did, in fact) a decent camcorder for 199.99. When you can get these for 199, then analog might be in trouble.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.
That would let you make cheap backups on the road or offload your video whenever you ran out of HD space (just pick up a few $4 minitapes anywhere), or copy video from an existing tape, etc.
Any of the knowledgeable folk in the DV/MPEG discussion above have technical objections or feasibility comments?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?