miniDV tape vs. HDD for around-the-world documentary?

G

greyhavens

Member
I am going to be making a documentary across Scotland, Tunisia, India, and Hong Kong over 1 year, spending 2-3 months in each place with potentially limited (meaning none) access to serious editing or computer facilities. I will have my one crappy G3 laptop with me and maybe a 500GB firewire drive if I decide to. I won't be roughing it in the back country by any means, but I may want to shoot several (4-5+) hours per day on some days and still be mobile.

My question: tape, or hard disk camera? Previous input on this site has seemed to say go with miniDV (unanimous approval for the DVX100b of course)...but will lugging 50 or even 100 miniDV tapes around really be easier than offloading footage from say an HDR-S12?

On the other hand I only have a G3 and I've heard you need an Intel Mac to handle AVCHD, so maybe I can't do HDD unless I upgrade my computer. Can anyone confirm this? Basically any wisdom about the eternal tape vs. hard disk debate would be mucho helpful.
 
Convert to file size. 1 hour of DV footage is about 13 gigs. It looks like the HDR-S12 will give you about 8GB/hour of 1080.

If you shoot 100 tapes, (Which is only 4-5 hours a day for 20-25 days) then you are looking at a TB of necessary hard drive space (without a redundant safety net).

MiniDV tapes are easy to come by, worldwide, and can be shipped back to homebase if you get too many to lug around.

My suggestion for tape is only take enough blank tape stock to get you started, ship spent tapes back home, and buy new ones as you go.

Alternately, compare prices of a 1+ TB of HDD(s) vs 100+MiniDV tapes. HDD's should be just as easy to come by abroad, should the need arise. Also, consider looking into an external drive enclosure, with several cheaper internal drives that can be filled up and sent home. You will eventually need the drive space anyway whether you use tape or disk.

I don't know much about avchd, but whether the computer could handle the footage or not, could you still use a ppc mac to transfer the data (?).

The trip sounds like a blast.
 
Tape all the way. Besides what Dirty Uncle Bob as already said, a bad spot on a tape means you'll only lose a few frames (a few seconds at worst) where as a bad spot on a HDD means you could lose the whole drive. Also, w/a HDD camera you always have to have the time, and electricity, to dump the footage off the camera onto an external drive where w/a tape camera you can just keep feeding it easily found tapes.


-A
 
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