Hard disk camcorders

Jeff Lynne · 23 Oct 2008 at 17:52

Does anyone have one? Are they any good?

I'm thinking of buying a Sony HDR-SR10E High Definition 40GB Hard Disc Drive Handycam Digital Camcorder- 4MP and want to know if it's as easy as it seems to transfer footage from the camera to the PC.

Sirrel Squirrel · 23 Oct 2008 at 18:05

They are good if you want to watch what you've recorded instantly on a TV or PC but as it stands the only program that can easily natively edit the files without any rendering is the new version of Adobe Premiere, CS4. Although saying that I think Sony Vegas can natively edit the files from a Sony camera but that'd be something you'll have to look into. So you are hindered a bit in choice of editing programs.

Transferring the footage to the PC is easy however, you'd just plug the camera in and it'll be picked up as a removable hard drive so you can copy the files off it.

As for the choice of camera, that is a good one but I highly recommend the Canon range of HD cameras in terms of image quality and features, either go for the HG20 or HG21 depending on how much you want to shoot.

The best format for editing though is still tape based, so a HDV camera like the Canon HV30 would be your best bet if you plan to edit a lot of footage.

Jeff Lynne · 23 Oct 2008 at 18:45

Thanks.

I already have a HD tape camera and find it frustrating that the message that the heads are dirty even though I run a head cleaning tape over them. I'm assuming that a hard disk camera won't suffer from this?!!

Sirrel Squirrel · 23 Oct 2008 at 18:54

No but you'll lose your footage if the hard drives fails. If your tape based one is under warranty I'd imagine you could get it repaired since that sounds like a fault, have you used just one brand of tape in it since switching between makes and brands can cause the problem you describe.

Jeff Lynne · 23 Oct 2008 at 19:42

Yes, used just the one brand but it's a good few years old now and I'm looking to move onto a different camera.

Do hard disk cameras have a habit of failing??

Sirrel Squirrel · 23 Oct 2008 at 19:51

No I think it's rare that they do just a risk you take but you can always back up your videos to your PC. Alternatively you could go for a flash card based camera, they record using the same codec as an HDD camera but you won't have to worry about the HDD failing and having to replace the whole camcorder. Down to you though, no difference in quality just a different type of storage.

Jeff Lynne · 23 Oct 2008 at 20:09

Yeah the one that I'm looking at has a flash drive or removable storage. I'll be using it to record things and then transfer them to pc to put them online, so it has to be compressable to smallish sizes and obviously not in hi-def format.

Yabsley · 24 Oct 2008 at 12:14

Anything is 'Compressable' to 'smallish' sizes but that doesn't really have anything to do with the Camera. Most new consumer camcorders seem to record in AVCHD format which from what I understand of it, is a way of compressing the footage so it fits on things like hard disks and flash memory. It isn't the same as tape in that respect, it is a compressed format.

As SS pointed out there currently aren't many applications that handle this format natively so that is probably a big thing to bare in mind. I believe there are a number of converters and other options you can use to get your footage into a format which is suitable for most applications but that may come with downsides like a loss of quality.

Sirrel Squirrel · 24 Oct 2008 at 12:57

Always shoot all of your footage in HD using the highest setting in the camera, you can compress it later using your PC.

DV and HDV (uses MPEG2) are both compressed formats too and the AVCHD (MPEG4) codec that HDD and Flash cameras use is pretty much identical to the compression on DV and HDV tapes as long as you use the highest setting there shouldn't be much of a difference.