High Definition: Redux

Yesterday I more or less went off about a couple of items from December Issue of PCWORLD. I re-read the article last night. I was hoping that my initial impression would be softened a bit. Alas, I was disappointed. The first issue comes within the first column of the article on the first page.

You can edit HDV content on a computer with a modest 2-GHz Intel Pentium CPU and 2GB of RAM, and you can use more video editing applications (including Microsoft Windows Movie Maker HD and Apple iMovie). But the power required for AVCHD typically starts with a 2.66-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad system.

The main issue comes from the last line, in bold. This is total horse crap! I have edited and rendered video files and DVDs that started with the output AVCHD files from my SR-12 on both of my laptops. Granted, they are newer so they are both Core 2 Duo cpus. One is a 2.0-GHz with 2GB of RAM and the other is a 2.4-GHz with 3GB of RAM. I had no issues and I got what I expected to be reasonable render times. I am willing to bet that my old HP laptop would have been up to the task just fine. It was a 3.0-Ghz P4 Northwood with 2GB of ram. A system that if I had it today would be 4+ years old. I will give the author that HDV can likely be edited with more applications out of the box than AVCHD can, but I don’t consider this a drawback at all. Movie Maker and iMovie are “nice” but they are very basic to begin with.

The applications that were mentioned, Pinnacle Studio Plus 12 (on Amazon for $125) and Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (Amazon for $90 or bundled with Photoshop Elements for $140) are really feature rich and will allow for a lot more flexibility when working with creating video projects. My personal favorite is Sony Vegas (currently $455 on Amazon) is better still AND Sony DVD Architect 5 is FREE (at least it was when I got it) if you have a license for Vegas. I am going to revisit the cost analysis that I did yesterday and include some software.

On the storage issue. The article claims that the SR-12 has enough room for 14 hours at the highest quality setting. Fair enough. The SR-11, the 60 GB version would then have enough room for 7 (this camera will come into play later). The author says

Its image quality and storage capacity are impressive, but unless you need to record for hours without a break, those advantages may not justify the camera’s price of $1300.

Yes, the storage size is impressive. What the author did NOT think about is going to be a big deal for me. Family vacations. I will be honest and say that there may be a time when I leave the laptop at home and I want to make sure I can capture all of the cool things and memories from the vacation. If I used tape, I would either have to cart around enough tapes for what I think I would use or hope that where I was would have them for sale at a reasonable price (knowing that if they are $20 online as shown yesterday, I might end up paying $30 in the store). Much easier to only have to worry about the battery being charged than if I have enough tape. No switching either. I just keep going. I wouldn’t call it a disadvantage.

So you say you don’t need 14 hours? You say 7 or so would be better? The list price Sony’s website shows is $1200, but they are currently selling it for $1000. A frugal shopper could probably find deals for a few hundred less on top of that. This price puts it on par / equal to the Canon Vixia HV30 (the mini-dv camera tested by PCWORLD) for price.

Here is my price comparison / price information table.

I don’t consider the mini-dv to be the “superior” choice. At least not as easily as PCWORLD seems to have proclaimed it. There are many MANY factors and the disadvantages that PCW seems to claim don’t really seem to be disadvantages in my mind. A few hundred extra dollars for having easily transferable video in high definition and a boat load of storage if I am not able to transfer all of my data in a timely fashion? No changing tapes or lugging extra tapes around. No running out of tape in a pinch.

Mini-DV for consuper and pro-sumer usage is on its way out. Don’t invest money in this technology as it is going to slip away very soon. When was the last time you bought a movie on VHS?

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.