adamr316
Well-known member
Some huge selling points that rarely go mentioned in marketing these tapeless cameras are the pains in the butt stuff we had to deal with using tape. They won't say it because they are still selling these machines to people but we can be real honest here.
With two memory card slots you don't have to worry about missing a frame of the action. When the card is about to fill up it simply starts recording to the other card. With tape, if you were fast, you'd lose at least 15-20 seconds of footage waiting for the tape to eject and then reloading it. This wasn't so much of a problem with full DV cameras but with MiniDV's 60 minute maximum (I refuse to record in LP mode) this was quite often a problem for event shooting.
Tape dropouts. The ugly stepchild of miniDV. Let's be honest MiniDV was a crappy recording medium. The image and sound quality was stellar but man if you got a little piece of dirt or some metal particle build up on the tape you dropped a frame. Ugh! It happened at least once during some part of production and if it were a once in a lifetime shot that needed to go into the final product...it was just a pain in the butt.
Anytime I shot MiniDV the first thing I'd do is capture to whole tape and save it to a hard drive and then burn those data files onto DVD. One of my professors who works for the Discovery Channel said that when they used minidv it was good for about 4-5 passes. So playback maybe once or twice all the way through and that was it for the tape's life without dropouts.
Let's not get started on HDV to minidv. a half second of footage lost due to dropout? No thanks.
With P2 or SxS...no more gunked up heads. You can reuse the cards over and over. They are initially expensive but you'd eventually pay that in tape stock and then some.
And since I was already always backing all of my footage up anyway transferring data from the card to a hard drive was such a piece of cake. My clips/takes are already "logged and captured"...big time saver as we all know.
I love it!!
With two memory card slots you don't have to worry about missing a frame of the action. When the card is about to fill up it simply starts recording to the other card. With tape, if you were fast, you'd lose at least 15-20 seconds of footage waiting for the tape to eject and then reloading it. This wasn't so much of a problem with full DV cameras but with MiniDV's 60 minute maximum (I refuse to record in LP mode) this was quite often a problem for event shooting.
Tape dropouts. The ugly stepchild of miniDV. Let's be honest MiniDV was a crappy recording medium. The image and sound quality was stellar but man if you got a little piece of dirt or some metal particle build up on the tape you dropped a frame. Ugh! It happened at least once during some part of production and if it were a once in a lifetime shot that needed to go into the final product...it was just a pain in the butt.
Anytime I shot MiniDV the first thing I'd do is capture to whole tape and save it to a hard drive and then burn those data files onto DVD. One of my professors who works for the Discovery Channel said that when they used minidv it was good for about 4-5 passes. So playback maybe once or twice all the way through and that was it for the tape's life without dropouts.
Let's not get started on HDV to minidv. a half second of footage lost due to dropout? No thanks.
With P2 or SxS...no more gunked up heads. You can reuse the cards over and over. They are initially expensive but you'd eventually pay that in tape stock and then some.
And since I was already always backing all of my footage up anyway transferring data from the card to a hard drive was such a piece of cake. My clips/takes are already "logged and captured"...big time saver as we all know.
I love it!!
I did learn something from using CF Cards. I'm not sure it applies, but as time goes on it maybe something you need to think about.
but also measure the usage. On CF Cards we now switch them out every 18 months. With the video cards it maybe much less for Filmmakers but for Videographers in Weddings or Television, if they act like CFs they'll have to be swicthed out.
