Hi!

I have a short question regarding tapeless camcorders.
Having experienced the pain that is editing mpeg 2 encoded videos, I'm starting to realize that tapeless camcorders may not yet be way to go. Though, I still don't get why today's HDD camcorders has to use mpeg instead of, say, the established DV-codec. A consumer HDD can store around 30GB of data, so the disk space shouldn't be the problem (a DV-tape is around 10GB, right?). Are there some legal issues at work here, or what? Or some technical problem I'm overlooking. Please help me understand...


/Tommy

I agree, it's pretty stupid that no tapeless camcorders exist that simply record DV AVI files to an internal drive. After all, you can buy expensive external hard drive recorders which connect by Firewire to any DV camera, so why don't there exist any camcorders which record DV to an internal hard drive?

The reason is probably a marketing one... companies think consumers demand HDD camcorders that can store dozens or even hundreds of hours of content, not just the 4 hours they'd get with a 60 GB drive. Ease of editing just isn't a factor in the decision-making, apparently.

And now that DV cameras are in decline, we probably will never see one that records directly to DV AVI files, as convenient as that would be. If we do, they will try and charge more for this "feature", even though it was the simple and obvious thing to do all along.

The situation doesn't get much better on the HD side, where consumers must deal with either MPEG-2 or AVCHD. If Panasonic would introduce a consumer HD camera that records to their new intraframe HD format, that would make editing footage so much easier...

By the way, some Canon digital cameras record MJPEG AVI files which are similar to DV quality and simple to edit with any application, even simple ones like VirtualDub. An example of such a camera is the TX1. If you don't need too many advanced camcorder-y features, maybe something like this would suit your needs. The audio is uncompressed PCM, the frames are captured progressively, and each frame is compressed separately (intraframe compression), just like DV.