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General discussion

HDD or MiniDV

Nov 25, 2005 2:07PM PST

I am a first time camcorder buyer and I am real concerned about storing, editing, and distributing my home videos.

Is JVC's HDD (Hard Disk Drive) camcorder the way of the future? Is it easier to edit and store video on a computer when using an HDD camcorder vs. MiniDV?

I do not have any experience with MiniDV. I have a few questions on the transfer rate and storage capacity needed when archiving my movies on a computer.

Thank you for your time.

Discussion is locked

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Most agree that if you want to edit your videos, mini-DV is
Nov 25, 2005 2:52PM PST

the way to go.

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(NT) (NT) AMEN!!!!
Nov 28, 2005 5:14AM PST
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a piece of idea
Dec 13, 2005 4:07AM PST

I'm a college student, I do a lot of video shooting for my school and I own a MiniDV and right now i'm looking a HDD camcorder. The reason is that I don't have time to transfer those tapes into my computer. Happy

In your case, HDD camcorder seems to be the better choice. It offers you the simplicity of transfering data to your computer, just plug and play so you don't have to mess around with those tapes and stuff.

The video quality is really good too, because HDD camcorder allows you to record DVD-quality (or mpeg-2) video. Once you are done recording, just dump the data into your computer(using USB 2.0 which is faster than firewire connection) and edit it if you wish or burn it to DVD. As a reminder, HDD camcorder records video digitally, so you don't have to deal with tranfering the tapes data into your computer.

Since it records video to mpeg-2 format, it does takes a lot of space of the HDD. For example, 1 hour of video takes up to 4G of your HDD. JVC offers 20G or 30G HDD camcorder and the prices are like 200 dollors different.

If you want to shrink the video into a smaller size, there are tons of software that does that. For me, i'm using Windows Media Encoder, why? simple, it's free. Happy

If you need further help, please let me know, till then, laters.

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a piece of idea
Dec 13, 2005 5:28AM PST

Convience vs picture quality???
MinDV has a much better picture quality than DVD mpeg-2, which is why the file size is so much bigger. 1 hour of captured DV takes up 12gb of HD on a PC.
All Digital cameras record digitaly!! Even the the crapy DVD cameras.
I do agree that it is a pain have to capture the miniDV tape.
I'm looking at a small HD based DV recorder, beltpack, firewire out from ANY camera, 40Gb HD 2.8hrs of DV quality. Firewire to PC at full 400 speed when you want to edit. John

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A student should know that miniDV tapes contain digital data
Dec 14, 2005 1:11AM PST

Since you don't, one has to wonder how good the rest of your analysis is. mpeg-2 is an inferior choice when compared to DV.

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Did you buy a HDD yet?
Mar 2, 2006 11:34PM PST

So did you buy a HDD camera yet? Which one?!
Also wondering if the JVC MG-70 is worth getting over the JVC MG-40 as far as better picture quality.
Thinking about waiting until the Sony DCR-SR100 gets a Cnet review.

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...
Apr 14, 2006 11:59AM PDT

Although it is MPEG-2, the same codec as DVD, it is not the same quality. It Compresses each set of 15 frames, so it has a great quality loss, and it becomes worse with each editing pass. It is also hard to find a converter that will work with this format. It may be easier to transfer, but it is a pain to work with.