Re: Flash vs Hard-drive-based Minicam


"iws" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:cj33k.1339$Jh7.180@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"PTravel" <ptravel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6b3pm4F3aj22jU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


It's going to be some time before we see affordable 14 gigabyte solid state memory.

Less than two years ago, I paid just under $90 for a 4 GB SD card. Today, such a card can be purchased for $15. Today, you can buy a 16G GB card for under $60. Do you have any doubt that it will be under $15 two years from now? I don't.

You're probably right. However, that's still significantly more than the cost of miniDV tape. I pay $10/tape (in bulk) because I want the highest quality miniDV tape -- I'm not in position where I can travel back to another country to reshoot video that was ruined by drop-outs and, because I'm not shooting "Billy's birthday" casual video, a significant drop out can be an issue for me. I also archive my source video -- my tapes are used exactly twice: once to shoot the video and once to capture it to computer. After that my tapes are stored and never reused. However, less demanding users can buy tape today for around $3 -- even two years from now, that still puts the cost of solid-state storage at 5 times as much as tape. Also, I'm curious about long-term archiving of solid-state media. I really don't know -- 30 years from now will the solid-state media still be bit-accurate and readable?

A MiniDV system is mechanically complex, heavier, bulkier,

True, however "heavier and bulkier" is not a bad thing for video. The one single factor that says, "amateur video" more than any other is a shaky image. Lighter cameras are more prone to shaking because their inertial moment is lower than heavier cameras. My HV20 is about 1/3 the weight of my VX2000. Both have very effective OIS shake reduction. However, I've had to develop specific techniques to get reasonably steady hand-held shots from the HV20 because it is so light. Similarly, small size is not a virtue for video because this means smaller, denser sensors. This is simple physics -- smaller sensors capture less light. Accordingly, low light performance of small-sensor camcorders is dramatically pooorer than with larger machines. "Smaller and lighter" is another mantra of consumers who don't care about video quality.

slower to download

Sure, but capture is the least part of the video process. When I'm travelling, I shoot between 30-60 minutes of video a day -- sometimes more, sometimes less. That means on a typical 2-week trip, I'll shoot 10-14 tapes. That means 10-14 hours for capture -- the better part of a day, and I can do something else while the computer is capturing as long as I'm around to swap tapes every so often. Editing 10-14 tapes into a finished project will, typically, take me 3 to 5 weeks. What's 10-14 hours compared to 2 weeks to shoot and a month to edit?

and within a couple of years almost certainly costlier in every way.

Within a couple of years, solid state memory will be 3-5 times as expensive as tape. Perhaps within 5-8 years it will be competitive from a cost perspective.

Oh, and those wonderful archive tapes - you'll always have to have a working MiniDV playback system to recover the data.

Or, at least, until a better long-term storage system comes along. I mentioned my 30-year old tapes. These are in 3 formats: VHS, for which machines are still available, 1/2" Betamax, for which machines are still available, and 3/4" Umatic, for which machines are still available 30 years after the fact and I keep working machines for each of these formats. MiniDV has been around 10 or 12 years, and there's no shortage of available machines, nor will there be for some time to come.

Better to archive your recordings on diffent media and re-archive periodically.

That still doesn't address catastrophic failure of the archive media. The only practical solution for digital video archiving other than tape currently is to use hard drives. Hard drives usually don't give any warning when they fail and, when they do, data recovery, if possible, is the exclusive province of very expensive recovery specialists. I currently have about 300 archived miniDV tapes --- that's 4.2 terabytes of data. To ensure survival of this much data would require a good RAID implementation costing many thousands of dollars. Though it might be nice to have such a system, so that I'd always have instant access to my video library, I'm not (and most consumers are not) in a position to spend more on storage than they do on their computer when simply putting the tapes in a dark, dry closet accomplishes exactly the same thing at no additional cost whatsoever.

As for "re-archiving periodically," currently it would take just as long to do that with 4 or 5 terabytes of video data as it would to capture from miniDV in the first place. I'm sure there will be a time when solid-state acquisition and storage becomes preferrable to tape-based systems. However, that time is definitely not now, nor will it come for at least another 5 to 10 years.





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