Shooting Tapeless
0
I like the idea of recording directly to solid state media to capture video. You save on tape cost and have a medium (in our case, SD cards) that you can record over and over on. The cards are fairly inexpensive (around $30 for 16 GB that will give you 2+ hours at full HD bitrate), and transfer speeds are robust if you plug the card directly into your computer. No more realtime capturing is a great time-saver.
There are tradeoffs, however, that require you to be disciplined. One big advantage to tape is that you always have an archived copy of your video. With card or hard drive based cameras, you had better make sure you've offloaded your video or you're sunk. Another good idea is to backup your video folder on a separate hard drive. Since there is no tape to retrieve, redundancy is your friend. It's a bit of a pain, but if you have ever lost any data, you know the feeling. Add to that the pressure of it being done for someone else and you'll really appreciate a safe copy opposed to "ummm...can we take up some more of your valuable time and reshoot that?"
You also need to make sure you've got a powerful enough machine to decode the current HD codec (quickly becoming the standard) AVCHD. This is compressed hi-def, and if you have a slow machine, good luck editing a choppy, crawling video track. Your only option will be to render out to a format your computer can handle, which means you should have shot on tape in the first place.
Leave a comment
To leave a comment, please log in / sign up
RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube