Video Recording Formats Compared

Is magnetic video recording tape dead?
No, certainly not. But for several years it's been apparent that the technology of magnetic recording tape is finally becoming obsolete. It's had an amazing run, as technologies go, surviving well over 50 years, and still going strong, despite premature reports of it's demise.

However, when considering your options, don't count tape out just yet. We are recommending to one of our clients the purchase of a new Canon XH-A1. This is a $3,500 professional High Definition camcorder that records HDV on standard miniDV tape cartridges. Our client is looking for a five-year life for this investment, and certainly miniDV tapes are not going to become scarce or difficult to find that soon. The Canon camcorder represents the best balance of high quality, nice lens, capability, and price value (to suit this client's needs) available today.

Random vs Sequential Access
The main difference between tape technology and the many digital alternatives popping up in the market is that tape is "sequential access". That simply means you can't go directly to any spot on the tape without using fast-forward or rewind. That takes time as well as some wear and tear on a mechanical tape transport mechanism and stress on the tape itself.

All of the digital formats offer "random access". which means you can jump to any point in your recordings virtually instantly. That's a big advantage, especially for anyone under time-pressure like TV news crews. Until recently, in order to get a fast-breaking news story on the air the only alternatives were to either risk a live feed or to rush a tape back to the studio where it had to be rewound and edited using relatively slow old-style linear methods, or digitally captured onto computers for non-linear editing. Either way, it took time. It's no coincidence that TV news organizations were among the first early-adopters of non-tape storage technologies such as portable hard drives and Sony's XDCAM (a fairly expensive pro system that records on cartridge DVDs).

The Choices
Currently, non-tape technologies available to consumers and professionals alike include:

Moving parts
The biggest disadvantage of tape is that it requires a lot of moving parts and a really complicated mechanism. If a modern micro-miniaturized tape transport breaks, you either have to pay to have it replaced or find a technician with a microscope and tiny surgical tools to try to fix it. Either alternative can be expensive enough to make your camcorder almost disposable.

Of all of the alternatives, HDD (hard disk drives) have the most moving parts, but they tend to be pretty reliable because they are sealed units. Hard disk drives are almost never repaired when they go bad. They are replaced, and any data that was stored on the drive when it failed is lost.

The DVD drives have far fewer moving parts and are therefore proportionally more reliable and easier to repair. Memory card recording features no moving parts in the storage mechanism at all, and for the future is arguably the most exciting choice. Currently however, the kind of high density ultra fast memory needed for HD video recording remains on the expensive side.

Camcorders always have some moving parts in the lens system, including zoom, auto-focus, auto-iris, mechanical stabilizers, etc. But reducing or eliminating the moving parts in the storage mechanism is a huge step. All motor-driven parts cause some noise and vibration, and even though it may be slight, it still has an effect on picture and sound quality. Memory card storage is expected to be the wave of the future because it allows for greater reliability, extreme miniaturization, lower cost (of the camcorder itself), and nearly vibration and noise free operation

Hard disk drive (HDD)
There are many advantages to having a built-in hard drive in your video camcorder, but the most important may be high capacity. You can record for just hours and hours at a time before the drive is filled. Relatively low cost, shock resistant, reliable, small hard drives have been in development for years to serve the laptop computer market. Therefore, the development cost and per unit production cost to incorporate them into video camcorders was minimized. Particularly for anyone who does a lot of computer video editing, hard drive camcorders are very attractive.

On the negative side, you do have to empty out the hard drive (generally into your home computer) or you may run out of space, and when you do, you are finished shooting unless you go back and select scenes to delete (similar to deleting pictures from a still camera's memory card), which can be a difficult process to do on the camcorder itself. Beyond that, any kind of sharing of your videos from an HDD camcorder involves some aspect of computer editing, if only downloading and transferring to DVD.

Standard DVD
For casual home movie video shooters who are not interested in doing any computer video editing, camcorders that save to standard (or small size standard) DVD disks is the answer. Shooting direct to DVD could be considered to be "the new VHS", because it allows you to simply shoot the movie, pop out the DVD and pop it into a set-top DVD player for the family to enjoy and for guests to suffer through.

That is not to say that video's recorded direct to DVD cannot be edited on your computer. However if you do want to do computer editing you should select a camcorder capable of recording to the DVD in different compression and file formats, because some are better for video editing than others.

Blu-Ray DVD (AVCHD)
AVCHD is a new High Definition storage format (explained further in other Video Top Secrets articles) that has a lot of promise for the future, but is currently not widely supported by either players (you can play your AVCHD DVD's on a Sony Playstation III, but not on a conventional set-top DVD player) or by editing software. At the time of this writing, only the newest version of Sony Vegas and an editing program by Nero support computer editing of AVCHD video.

Despite all that, AVCHD is a very exciting video format with great promise for the future. It is likely to replace HDV as the format of choice for both consumers and professionals recording compressed High Definition video. If you don't mind being on the bleeding edge while support for AVCHD catches up, and if you're okay with possibly having to use your camcorder as your movie player for a while, you may want to seriously consider the AVCHD camcorder options rapidly becoming available from several manufacturers including Panasonic and Sony.

Memory Card recording
What's not to like? Persistent rewritable RAM memory cards appear to have it all: small size; no moving parts; simplicity; instant random access; virtually immune to shock and vibration. Indeed, just as memory cards have almost entirely replaced photographic film for still cameras, they appear poised to do the same for digital video camcorders. The only thing keeping memory cards from dominating the market today is that they are not (yet) cost competitive with the other alternatives. If digital memory technology continues to develop at the current pace the density and cost per capacity issues will be soon conquered. Memory cards may yet take over within a year or two.

Panasonic was one of the first to market with video to memory card storage with their professional P2 memory card system. P2, built on multi-channel SD technology (see the Glossary for tech details) is a very fast design intended to plug directly into the PC-card slot found in all laptop computers, enabling instant transfer for video editing.

Recently, Panasonic released a new memory card camcorder AG-HSC1U aimed at the high-end consumer and low-end professional market. Rather than using Panasonic's still expensive P2 cards, this camcorder records to a single common 4-gigabyte capacity SDHC (Secure Digital-High Capacity) memory card. The camcorder comes with a 40 gigabyte portable hard drive set up to allow you to empty the memory card onto the hard drive so you can keep shooting, up to 410 minutes in the highest quality HD mode (much more in lower quality modes).

P2 memory techology is also falling in cost, although more slowly than many had hoped when it was introduced. If that trend continues, P2 may emerge as a strong competitor in the future consumer market for memory card video recording and editing.