Q: Memory stick? Video on RAM/SD/Memory???

[dawolf42]

I love the way my digital photo camera can also shoot 320x240 video's. Plug it into the computer and I have the video.

But from what I know/knew/understood digital video on real camcorders goes onto a tape first.

Now I hear from a friend that at Walmart they have a Samsung Mini-DV cam which works with a Memory Stick. Memory stick? Did some searching on the web and via www.memorystick.com found out it basically is what SD is to my digital photo camera.

Now, am I right to understand that with a camera like this one can actually shoot good quality video straight onto a memory(card) and download it into the computer?!?!

[ZippyP.]

DV footage is usually about 13 GB per hour. How big are the memory sticks?

[lordsmurf]

The Sony Memory Stick was one of those stupid ideas they had to be different.

[dawolf42]

What I read is that you have Memory Stick (up to 128 MB) and Memory Stick Pro ( 256 MB - 1GB) which is developed by SD and Sony.

This page lists some recording times. 1GB at high quality would give 250 minutes.

From the responses, am I right then to understand that basically DV is still stored on tape?

[redwudz]

DV is stored on tape, yes. The digital memory sticks or memory cards on digital cameras (Not camcorders) will store video, but it's not DV. If my memory serves me properly, my Canon S400 digital camera uses .Mov format (Quicktime, I believe) at 15fps at 320 X 240 resolution. You can get about 12 minutes on a 256MB memory card, but only shot in 3 minute intervals. Don't know much about camcorders, but I assumed their memory cards were for single shot digital camera mode.

The recording times for memory cards you reference is for compressed storage, apparently DIVX or similar. This is used more for handheld devices such as a PDA to watch stored movies. You convert a regular movie to pocket pc or Palm format.

I suppose in a few years (or maybe a lot more) there will be inexpensive memory cards in the 20GB range that can hold an hour of DV quality video and that will be the end of video tape. But not now.

[johns0]

In about 5 years when memory sticks,cards etc can hold huge amounts of information then it will replace tapes all together for filming,as of now dont even bother trying to use this type of storage,just not enough storage for qood quality motion pictures.