MiniDV vs memory card camcorders - what's the difference?

[festmaster]

I have had a Panasonic and Sony miniDV camera and hated them both. The firewire connections were temperamental and the output on a 50inch screen was awful. I see extraordinary improvements every day in new camcorders and decided to hold off buying a high cost replacement for the time being until things settle out a little more. For the interim, I bought a $99 high def memory card camcorder from Best Buy under their house brand, Insignia. For a cheap camcorder it is very decent. The colors are a little over saturated and the microphone doesn't pick up sound as well as I would like, but the video on the 50 inch screen is great.

My recommendation is to get something cheap and wait a year for something great at a reasonable cost.

[edDV]

I have had a Panasonic and Sony miniDV camera and hated them both. The firewire connections were temperamental and the output on a 50inch screen was awful. I see extraordinary improvements every day in new camcorders and decided to hold off buying a high cost replacement for the time being until things settle out a little more. For the interim, I bought a $99 high def memory card camcorder from Best Buy under their house brand, Insignia. For a cheap camcorder it is very decent. The colors are a little over saturated and the microphone doesn't pick up sound as well as I would like, but the video on the 50 inch screen is great.

My recommendation is to get something cheap and wait a year for something great at a reasonable cost.

The difference is

MiniDV format = DVD with 720x480* 4:3 or 16:9 resolution. MiniDV compression is ~5x. Every frame is recorded.
Camera sections ranged in price from $200 to >$25,000.

DVD compression is MPeg2 with 15 frame GOPs. Compression ranges ~12x to over 40x.

Memory card cameras can be many formats but latest are some form of MPeg h.264 with 15 frame GOPs. HD versions are compressed 45x to 160x.

[DereX888]

I've always thought: Mini DV camcorders MUST be better than memory card ones

But is this the true?

Reason why I thought this: MiniDV camcorders are bigger
Erm... well... that was about it!

I couldn't beleive that a camcorder just a bit bigger than the size a pack of ciggarettes could ever match a mini dv camcorder???

Now: I've been reading up a lot about the Canon F100 - I'm just aobut to buy...
But then I thought: if this one is as good as mini DV, then how about other ones that are even smaller and skinnier and lighter???

Any feedback would be great!

Thanks




OM

Video is not only resolution. Even if that tiny "pack of cigarettes" camera is shooting at HD res AVCHD, it will still suffer from bad or tiny optics (or both), alas MiniDV - as inferior resolution and bulky it may be - even with not-the-best optics it will be able to do much more than that tiny high-res toy.

In that regard video is no different than photography, it just takes many pictures per second instead of one (or few).
Same general rule applies here: Crappy input (optics) = crappy output(just at higher res in this case)
My bro brought a "HD" camera toy shooting at real HD 1080 res to SD card few years ago from Japan or Taiwan, Camtek or Qtek or something like that. "Pack of cigarettes" exactly as you've said. It even shot 12mpx interpolated stills (resolution unheard of - in a non-pro camera - back then in USA). Yet with its puny lenses and terrible 1x/2x zoom all it could do was exactly as I said: shoot crap (in HD).
I don't think these "cigarettes pack" tiny camcorders are really much better than that toy was.
Best proof is that my bro never used it and always borrowed my inferior and bulky MiniDV hehe, while that toy - after his initial "wow" - landed in one of the bins in the garage I think.

But then again: if all what you will be shooting with it - is typically family gatherings, Christmas, or vacations and such, then I'm pretty sure most of people don't need any better optics nor features than what is already available in this "pack of cigarettes" camcorder, right?

[tomj]

DVD compression is MPeg2 with 15 frame GOPs. Compression ranges ~12x to over 40x.

Memory card cameras can be many formats but latest are some form of MPeg h.264 with 15 frame GOPs. HD versions are compressed 45x to 160x.

The compression factor does not tell you anything about quality. I get 20x compression using gzip on text, and that's lossless compression. If I could get 5x lossless compression using old RLE would you guys argue that RLE is better because it only compresses 5x vs 20x? If anything it's the opposite, if you get the same quality out, then the 20x is better than the 5x.

So, it doesn't matter if the compression is 12x or 160x, what you care about is the lossiness of the compression. You can make both mpeg2 and mpeg4 have great quality or crappy quality. Many AVCHD (mpeg4) camcorders chose to use very lossy profiles, but if you're educated, you can find a camcorder which uses good quality avchd. You just have to have the computing horsepower to edit it.

[edDV]

DVD compression is MPeg2 with 15 frame GOPs. Compression ranges ~12x to over 40x.

Memory card cameras can be many formats but latest are some form of MPeg h.264 with 15 frame GOPs. HD versions are compressed 45x to 160x.

So, it doesn't matter if the compression is 12x or 160x, what you care about is the lossiness of the compression. You can make both mpeg2 and mpeg4 have great quality or crappy quality. Many AVCHD (mpeg4) camcorders chose to use very lossy profiles, but if you're educated, you can find a camcorder which uses good quality avchd. You just have to have the computing horsepower to edit it.

You are telling us nothing new. Codecs are designed to purpose. H.264 is optimized for distribution not editing (recode). If you manage your workflow and never recode, h.264 is a good choice for consumer flash ram recording. It's even possible to cut h.264 and only affect the frames in the affected GOP. But if you intend to seriously edit your video, h.264 will suffer greatly in decode and recode.

Pro production formats mostly record intact fields and frames with only intraframe compression. That allows smooth cuts editing without loss and minimal loss for effects editing with recode. This includes the DV family of formats, DigiBeta and HDCAM. A new format from Panasonic is AVC-Intra. AVC-Intra uses h.264 only intraframe.

Sony has been developing IMX (editable MPeg2) for over a decade. These formats use intraframe and interframe compression but are designed for recode in editing with minimal loss. The HD version is called XDCAM-EX. HDV is a 25Mb/s version of XDCAM.

So one chooses the right tool for the job. There are ways to edit AVCHD with less loss. There are affordable digital intermediate formats for AVCHD but most consumers won't bother. Check out Cineform Neo-Scene and Apple Intermediate Codec for Final Cut.