PC World’s Mini-DV vs “tapeless” HD cameras

PCWORLD’s article comparing mini-dv high definition video cameras to their tapeless counterparts was “sound” as far as reviews are concerned. I don’t have it in front of me right now and I wish that I did. I really should read it again before I dish out too much criticism. However, I have a serious problem with some of their findings. I think they missed the mark and didn’t emphasize the clear advantages for the pro-sumer and tape-less media.

I am just going to look at their top two cameras. The one that got their best rating, an 82, was a mini-dv based camera. I don’t recall the brand or model. Just that it was $1000 and recorded in HD. Their second place was, at 80 points, was the Sony HDR-SR11/12 (I am nearly 100% positive it was the SR-12). They said that the mini-dv camera “edged” out tapeless alternatives. You call two points an appreciable difference to call it “edging out”? Seriously?

I will give some ground on the point that mini-dv can be archived pretty easily. However, I really don’t see that as a huge issue. Hard drive space has gotten insanely cheap. Two weeks ago I purchased a pair of 1 TB (931 GB Formatting to NTFS under Vista) hard drives for $100 each. I just last night saw a deal with MIR for similar drives for $80. Now I need to find out exactly what storage requirements my SR-12 requires if we use this as a starting point:

Digital video applied with standard DV/DVCPRO compression takes up about 250 megabytes per minute or 13 gigabytes per hour.

Let’s (to make the math easy) call it 15 GB per hour and that my 1 TB hard drive has 900 GB of space. This is 60 hours of HD video. Per drive. 120 hours for both my drives. $100 /  120 hours = $0.84 per hour of video. Sounds cheap to me. How does the physical tape compare?

So a 2-pack of 63 minute tapes costs approximately $20. This is $10 per hour. Now, lets say that I have my two hard drives mirrored. This makes the cost per hour around $1.70 per hour. I have a redundant back up. So clearly, just from a pure by the numbers cost for storage. Hard drive or non-tape wins. hands down.

Now, lets talk about editing… in my experience mini-dv being totally linear, to get it to the computer you have to have a video capture device and capture in near real time. Now, I have to admit that I have not tried out any HD mini-dv cameras. So this may be different, especially over firewire, it might be faster. You still have to run the tape from start to finish. Let’s just assume that getting the video to the computer is just as easy as it is for the tape-less units. Connected the camera and hit import and go get a cup of coffee.

What happens if you have different clips that you want to seperate? You have to edit the mini-dv capture video. You have to find the point you want to split and then using some video editing software create to clips and then render each individually. If I am thinking ahead and I stop recording at natural split points with my SR-12, I have individual files created already for me. I can do what I want with the individual clips without needing to first edit them to seperate them out. Seems like a time saver to me. I don’t know about you, but my time is extremely expensive.

Now, I don’t want to say that what they did was totally wrong. They did have some good points and the evaluation of each camera seemed pretty fair. Very fair actually. I do want to contest that the video quality of the SR-11/12 is only “good”. The picture quality is spot on, i would call it “good”. Then again, I didn’t spend money on a high definition video camera to take really amazing photos. I have my DSLR for that.

Given that the reviews were pretty fair to say that the pro-sumer should actually be considering a mini-dv based system? Horse Hocky! Our lives are busy enough as they already are. I don’t want to add all this additional time to editing my vacation movies. The cost of storage media and the time to transfer and edit video is just way too long for mini-dv cameras.

I will re-read the article again, and go back and check my storage for some hard numbers about the SR-12 and what it needs per minute / hour in terms of storage.