Re: New Canon HF11 - The impending demise of consumer HDV?

"David Ruether" <d_ruether@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:g6fhgf$nb7$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Smarty" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:5Exik.81$aA5.43@xxxxxxxxxxx
"Gary Eickmeier" <geickmei@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:488aa28a$1$7794$2318a52a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Smarty" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dsQhk.357$X2.59@xxxxxxxxxxx

I mostly agree, but I must admit that the attractions of AVCHD have become pretty addictive once I have started using them. Specifically, the very small and light camera, the individual video clips which can each be accessed randomly and instantly without winding/rewinding tape, and the especially fast ingest which now takes only a minute or two versus an hour can become very compelling. For whatever it is worth, I now grab the HF100 most of the time rather than the HV20, and both deliver very comparable quality.

I do indeed miss the archival tapes, but have adopted a backup format which accomplishes the same thing.

I wonder what the hell business they have selling consumers cameras that record to flash drives or hard drives? We're talking consumers now - they shoot something, come home and what do they do with it? Do they expect them to archive to their hard drives, or burn bunches of Blu-Ray discs, or what? At least when all the cameras were tape based, they could play their stuff from the camera, then put a new tape in and go again. And whether they knew how to burn to DVD or not, they still had all of the original material available, marked, and on the shelf.

Gary Eickmeier

Delivery of HD for consumers has been a huge problem for early adopters, with HD DVD providing (IMHO) the only viable and low cost solution up until recently. Once HD DVD "died", the HD videographer faced a real problem in delivering content with original pristine quality at low cost.

AVCHD promises to change that, and indeed I have discovered that AVCHD-encoded content from the flash/hard disk cameras, if transferred directly to AVCHD disks without transcoding / re-rendering, really do deliver on the promise. With red laser 4.7 GB disks and today's 17 MBit/sec VBR encoding, a disk delivers 35 or 40 minutes of content. A DL disk brings the time over an hour of uninterrupted playback for those who like to truly suffer.....

8^)

The essential conclusion / observation I can offer is that AVCHD with no transcoding on a red laser disk has the same economy and performance as HDV performance on a red laser HD DVD disk, both avoiding expensive burners and very expensive media. For archiving,*** if *** one has faith in optical disk dyes as an archival storage method (and this is a really big "if"), then a very low cost off the shelf solution is to buy a Canon DW-100 DVD burner which plugs directly into the flash cameras, and immediately burn an AVCHD disk whenever you want to back up an SD flash card or distribute your content without the use of a computer. For $185, this is a very nice solution.

Since AVCHD disks play on many if not most BluRay players, and several very inexpensive editing/authoring programs now deliver AVCHD disks, some without transcoding, I would have to think that this is the 'bridge' solution until BluRay burners and disks become cheaper and more popular. Thankfully, the software is now there to handle this format (finally) although the warnings regarding the need for high performance CPUs as well as the criticisms of buggy and poorly designed code are still extremely noteworthy.

I'm beginning to believe that there is some validity to this AVCHD approach, given the devices like the $185 burners which go directly from the camcorder to the consumer's playback machine. I would not be at all surprised to see a smaller format DVD burner built into an AVCHD camcorder one of these days.....

Smarty

You state a BIG "***if***" above! ;-) Even if users realize that
their dye-based disks have a relatively short life compared with
commercially-made pressed DVDs (and take steps to properly
store them and periodically copy them for preservation of the
contents), it is unlikely that most will take suitable disk archiving
measures - and we are likely to see a flood of complaints about
"great" and "irreplaceable" footage lost through computer HD
failures, accidental erasures, or DVD failures (which can happen
in as little as a couple of weeks with badly handled DVDs). Your
other caveats about AVCHD should also be taken seriously. I
think is not yet a medium that should be committed to lightly...!
--David Ruether
www.donferrario.com/ruether
d_ruether@xxxxxxxxxxx


I entirely agree David, and can only hope that the void will be filled eventually with archiving and delivery solutions which truly preserve video for years. HDV still has the best solution in this regard and I am a big tape enthusiast. I also have to wonder whether the various forms of compression including mpeg2, AVC, and the others have enduring longevity. I can imagine that movies and videos will go through many more variations of digital compression as the years go on.

Smarty

.

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