Video camera technology OT

Gordy

 Just wondering what all of you think of the latest video camera technology.



What I have learned since my HI8 Digital8 has been on the fritz so I went shopping.



 They are phasing out the the hi8 camera so that means if my camera breaks I can't view my tapes so now I'm transfering to computer for burning.



 Disk video cameras are also being phased out.



 I bought a JVC for 270 bucks about what I paid for the old sony I own. When I got it home, and tried it out I was shocked at the poor quality of the video when I hooked it up to my LCD TV. So I took it back.



  Basically what I learned is the sub HD market is the same across the board for video quality no matter which brand, which is less than my HI8 Digital8 by a lot. What you get for the extra dollars are internal HDD capacity which is no the best thing to rely on, and a few other blls and whistles. HDD are fragile and if they malfunction whats on the HDD can not be retrieved. So next option is SD cards a tangible media that you can keep your memories on to transfer.





 Don't be fooled by the HD video camera market. If you don't own a blu-ray burner you will only get the sub HD video camera quality. So you buy the camera for 500 bucks starting, then there is the blu-ray burner for another 200-300 bucks to get the HD quality. Or you can watch in HD off the camera with a mini HDMI cable that costs 70 bucks.



I'm not a high tech video buff but it frosts me to see the video quality of cameras go backwards. They seem to be hanging their hat on the cameras size, and media storage convienence. Rather than improving video quality which is the reason you buy the camera in the first place.





 Sorry kinda venting to.



Gordy

 

Paul Fredricks_3

Thanks for the vent!

I've been thinking of a new camera. Our current one, Sony 8mm, does not have the digital capability so it's a pain to put it on the computer. But after your post maybe I'll stick it out a bit longer.



I'm sure there are professional quality cameras, but they probably have a price that is quite high.

Gordy

More Venting

 I get fired up because I associate all of the electronics market to the computer market.



 I remember my first computer was a canon the specs were a 75 MHZ proccesor, 130MB HD with 4MB or RAM. A 14" color monitor, and a bubble jet printer. All for 2100.00.



Today for the same price range you can get a 2.5 GHZ quad core processor, 1 TB HD, 8 GB of RAM, a 25" LCD Monitor, and a printer that scans, copies, prints pics. All for darn near the same price.





I remember the first VHS vcr we owned cost 450.00 had a wired remote, now you can get a blu-ray dvd player for 140.00.



My very first camcorder VHS was like a tv camera cost about 400 bucks. Through the years for a while they were getting smaller, and the storage media getting smaller, and better.

 I have been transfering all my Hi8 to computer to burn on DVD. I plan to do the same with my VHS. I have noticed the aging tapes are losing some quality as I go back to around the year 2000. I have not got to the VHS ones yet.



Gordy

Gordy

The up side

 I should note that while it seems to be a large investment to go blu-ray burn drive, and HD camera there are some pluses.



As I transfer my hi8 to the computer it is about 15 GB for an hour of video. While you can compress the file video, and sound quality suffer. A typical DVD holds 4.7 GB, dual layer holds 8.5 GB. If you up to blu-ray capability the blu-ray DVDs hold 25GB, and dual layer holds 50GB. 



So in the end you can cut down on the size of your DVD library, and be able to get a full video tape or two on one Blu-ray single layer disk. Plus Blu-ray disks or more robust.

One could just let the pros transfer the video for you, but it comes at a cost about 7.00 a tape. For me that translates to over 1000.00. So that would justify buying the equipment to have the capability of doing it myself.



If anyone reading this has some info they can share to help me and others on this topic I would appreciate the help.



Gordy

Constantin

Compression...

Many camcorders now write to little flash cards and have multiple compression and/or image quality settings.



The image quality setting is usually expressed in pixels, i.e. what kind of a grid the camera will try to capture. Confusingly, multiple SD and HD resolutions exist, I guess in an attempt to simplify things for consumers (while achieving the opposite). Resolution can also vary in terms of how a camera captures an image - either interlaced (skipping every other line as with our NTSC-era TVs) or progressive (more modern era formats and superior IMO).



After capturing the image, the image processor inside the camera goes to work to compress the images down. Almost invariably something gets lost in most compression algorithms, especially those that are very good at paring images down. The art behind the alogrithms is to make you not notice what got lost. For example, one popular thing to do is to only update the parts of the picture that are changing - this works very well for scenes in which the focus is on a relatively still head on a very still background.



As computers become more powerful, the overhead regarding dealing with better and better decompression becomes more tolerable - that is one reason why the first generation of digital laserdiscs had no compression (IIRC) while the industry had moved onto MPEG-2 for dvds a couple years later (along with a much higher track-density, among other features). However, no matter how good a computer you use, compression in moving images almost invariably creates pixelation and other phenomena that are noticeable. That is one of the beauties of the older analog or uncompressed digital formats - they use a lot of media/space to store stuff but the fidelity is not compromised by compression.



I am in the process of digitzing older film images, not because I want to print them anytime soon but because I know that unless I store the film in a cold vault, that the negatives will crumble/colorshift over time (there is no way to stop the development process in color film as there is in black and white). It's time consuming, imperfect, etc. but it's better to have something in hand that you can distribute, etc. for safekeeping than relying on a single-point-of-failure backup system. So my advice to anyone that cares about older analog recordings (or VHS), get that stuff transcribed, either at home or in a professional lab, before the media self-destructs.



Tape is not a long-term solution either, BTW - the oxides can flake, drop off, etc. I suggest using multiple, cheap, redundant copies on hard drives instead. They're usually relatively easy to transcribe, pretty quick, and non-proprietary like some film formats, etc. And that's the other thing: store the data in a format that is future-proof also - i.e. non-proprietary containers and other software shenanigans that some manufacturers like to bless us with.

Gordy

Digitizing media

Are you doing Video or Pics?



Good to see you on the wall again Constantin !



Gordy

jpf321

I run with a Canon HF-11

I got a Canon HF-11 about 1yr ago .. I love it .. good size, great quality.. easy operation pro-sumer-ish (I see that is now discontinued and they have the HF-S11 for $1100)



Recently my company has been getting the little Sanyo Xacti 720p units .. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/601829-REG/Sanyo_VPC_CG10P_Dual_Camera_Xacti_720p.html .. for the money, you can't beat em and they are pretty rugged. Feature lacking but it depends on your needs.



It is true that if you want HD from your camera, you need to put on BD since DVD doesn't handle HD formats .. however, I usually stream them as the native files from my 1TB disk through my playstation3 .. to my TV .. of course this means I don't share them much for TV viewing... when I do share vids, I post them to http://www.vimeo.com and have found their services to be wonderful and the community is very knowledgeable and pro-ish .. not the same crowd as YouTube.



I did once play around with a software that allowed burning a BD-like data image to a DVD disk using a DVD RW drive .. but I don't think I got too far .. but I think such things are out there.



Hope this helps.

Gordy

Video quality

Is what I'm after at a reasonable price. Thats not 1100 dollars when good quality was there for 300-400 dollars. They just decided to phase out that type of camera, and storage media.





What happens if your hard drive crashes, You need to get that media on storage media like Constantin said. Ask me I have had it happen. Lucky I was able to use a picture recovery program to retrieve the pics, but you lose time stamps, and its a mess trying to sort out the findings.

 Gordy