Tapeless HD camcorders

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem

I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) – while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.

Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:

• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/519149-REG/Sanyo_VPC_HD1000BK_Xacti_HD1000_HD_Camcorder.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/521864-REG/Panasonic_HDC_SD5BNDL_HDC_SD5_AVCHD_Digital_Camcorder.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/539291-REG/Canon_2708B001_VIXIA_HF_100_AVCHD_Flash.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537788-REG/JVC_GZ_HD5_GZ_HD5_60GB_HD_Everio.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537789-REG/JVC_GZ_HD6_GZ_HD6_120GB_HD_Everio.html

The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded.  Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD.  There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues.  I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding.  I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.

Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg – that is the topic for another article, perhaps.

Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!

Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.