Is there anyone out there who could provide suggestions/comments on the
following?

I have a dedicated video editing pc that I have used to convert analog 8mm
and hi8 video to digital and then edit to videotape.  I use it for home
video work, not professional.  I am also learning dvd authoring and
creation.  Until now, I have only used an analog camera but would now like
to acquire a digital camcorder, again for use in making home movies.

In researching digital camcorders I've come up with some questions about the
palm-sized, reasonably priced models, as profiled in a Feb 2005 PC Photo
article beginning on p. 68.

1.  Format-

I see there are three main formats, miniDV, Digital8 and DVD.  DVD is
appealing in that the video would be recorded to a relatively permanent
medium, rather than have to keep the video on tape or transfer it from tape
to a DVD.  Is the quality of the video recorded to DVD the same as the
quality of video recorded to tape?  If not, how much difference is there?
Sometimes, while there is a difference, it is not that much when considering
the use is in home videos.

Am I correct in assuming that I could move a video file, recorded from the
camera to a DVD, to my editing computer and then import it into Adobe
Premiere?

Since I have a lot of hi8 and 8mm tapes that I have not yet transferred into
my video editing pc and my old hi8 camcorder is not functional anymore,
could I use a digital8 video camcorder to play the old 8mm and hi8 tapes for
transfer into the video editing pc?

I have read that digital8 is on the way out.  Which format, miniDV or DVD,
has the best video quality and is most likely to survive longer?

2.  Imaging Device-

The camcorders in the palm-sized, reasonably priced range seem to have
imaging devices using 1/6, 1/5, 1/4.5, 1/4 and 1/3.4 inch ccd's.  The result
is effective pixel sizes from 290k to 1.3 million effective pixels.

Would any imaging device producing images with effective pixels beginning at
290k produce a good image, or would one be better off with the highest
number of effective pixels possible?  What is a good image, you ask?  Well,
I guess a nice, clean image with no noticeable defects when burned on a DVD
and played on a typical DVD player-TV combo.

3.  Still photo capability-

I have an excellent digital camera (Canon EOS 10D) and do not need or want a
still photo capability on a digital video camera.  However, many of the palm
sized, reasonably priced digital video cameras come with still photo
capability.  Does having still photo capability mean having an unnecessary
bell or whistle?  Is it a good idea to avoid still photo capability and look
for a camera without it?  Or does it not make any difference?

There's a slight difference.  For home video you probably won't care.

You may need additional software that's likely to come with the camera.

Only with the fancier D8 cameras.

Neither one is going anywhere anytime soon.

For video, you want the lowest possible number of pixels, and optical
image stabilization.  Those cameras with more pixels have them to
support digital image stabilization (cheaper than optical
stabilization, like digital zoom is cheaper than optical zoom) and to
support high-resolution still pictures (if you want to shoot stills
and don't want to buy a separate still camera, that may be an
acceptable compromise, but I'm strictly addressing shooting video).

Still capability is all the rage in consumer digicams and the result
is they put more pixels on the ccd's, which lowers the ccd area per
pixel, which means more image noise.  If you look at a professional
video cam, it has a large sensor (or more likely, several large
sensors) with 350k pixels (720x480, the resolution of DV video), and
doesn't shoot stills.  If you look at a consumer video cam, it has a
tiny sensor but has millions of pixels so it can shoot stills.
Professionals would not stand for that.

I agree with much of what you said, but a few points:

Show quoteHide quoteI disagree.  MiniDV is clearly superior for a number of reasons.  It will
produce the best video quality of the three (noticeably so), offers longer
recording time at far higher quality than DVD, and is readily editable.  DVD
camcorders do on-the-fly mpg transcoding at either fixed or one-pass
variable bit rate, resulted in signficantly degraded image quality.
Digital8 is a dead format, limited to only a couple of rock-bottom-priced
consumer cameras manufactured by Sony.


A miniDV camcorder can be connected directly to a computer with a
1394/Firewire connection.  Though the term "capture" is applied to the
process of moving the video data from a miniDV or Digital8 camcorder into a
computer, it's a misnomer as it is really a simple bit-for-bit data
transfer.  DVD video can also be moved bit-for-bit, but most editing
programs, including Adobe Premiere, will either have trouble with the mpeg
format, or will not be able to handle it at all.  Moreover, frame-accurate
editing and transistions for mpeg video is extremely difficult and will
result in re-transcoding and subsequent image degradation.

"Fancier D8" is, at this point, an oxymoron, as Sony has limited their
manufacture to the bottom of their line and, IIRC, the two or three models
still available do not all support digital transfer.  A better option would
be to pick up a cheap Hi8 camcorder on eBay, transfer the video and then
abandon the format.


MiniDV has vastly superior video quality to DVD camcorders.  Even a
relatively efficient DVD machine is going to have compression rates an order
of magnitude higher than miniDV.


Show quoteHide quoteI agree that high-density pixels to support still imaging result in
diminished video quality.  However, for a consumer camcorder, electronic
image stabilization with a 1 megapixel sensor will produce results
equivalent to lower-priced consumer machines with optical image
stabilization.

The OP should look for sub-megapixel sensors, but the largest _physical_
sensor possible, e.g. 1/4" is better than 1/6" because it will, as a rule,
have better low-light sensitivity.  Sony machines use HAD CCDs, which, for a
sensor of a given size, will have enhanced lowlight performance than a CCD
without HAD.

And diminished low-light performance.  Some better high-pixel camcorders do
subpixel averaging, which improves noise response but, as a rule, high
density sensors should be avoided.

Exactly right.

Maybe with a good camera.  With consumer cameras there won't be much
difference to notice.

Depending on the amount of compression used, recording time can be
about the same.  What I really want is a full-sized DVD camera
(not those silly mini-DVD's) that will have longer recording time
than mini-DV.

Question is whether the degradation is enough for a typical home user
to care about.  The lens and camera electronics are going to have much
more effect.

Hitachi too, I think.  Main use of a D8 camera is to digitize old Hi-8
and video-8 tapes.

Yes you're likely to have to use another program to convert mpeg to avi.

Nah, just convert the mpeg to avi once, and edit the avi.  Frame
accurate editing isn't so important for home video either. 

I think the fancier models still do.  Otherwise try ebay.

Earlier discussion on this subject seemed to indicate that you get
better transfers doing the transfer in a D8 camera.  The difference
might not be worth the cost, depending.

People watch DVD movies on TV all the time and the video looks fine.
The video from DVD camcorders isn't inherently worse, though it might
be worse in some particular camera implementations.

Sorry, but I disagree.  There are consumer cameras and consumer cameras.
Perhaps in the $300-400 range, you're correct, but Canon and Sony both offer
fairly decent consumer miniDV camcorders in the $1000 range that provide
markedly better quality than any DVD camcorder.

I'm curious -- why do you like DVD for a camcorder format?  Tape is a better
archival format than DVD-R, and any mpeg compression format is going to
require far more compression than miniDV.  A full-sized DVD holds 4.7
gigabytes of data.  A 60-minute miniDV tape holds 13 gigabytes. DV-25, which
is the format used for miniDV and Digital8, uses a compression factor of
approximately 5 to 1.  DVD mpeg requires at least double that.

That's true at the very bottom range of consumer camcorders.  I guess we may
have different ideas about what is a "typical home user."  I admit to being
at the top end of amateur users and, as such, atypical (I shoot with a $2200
3-ccd VX2000).  However, I think the "I'll take what I can get as long as
it's only $250" bottom end user is also atypical.  Most consumers fall
somewhere between the KMart Blue Light Special bargain hunter and me, i.e.
they'll spend between $600 and $1200 on their camcorder.  In that price
range, there's a marked and readily discernible quality difference in the
video produced by miniDV and DVD camcorders.


I thought Hitachi stopped making D8, but I may be wrong.  I agree it's handy
to drop in Hi8 and 8mm tapes, but it's equally easy to let a miniDV
camcorder digitize those (as well as any VHS and other legacy formats) on
the fly.  I've kept my venerable Hi8 camera around specifically for this
purpose.

Ah, yes, but as soon as you do, you'll degrade the image even further.  I've
heard that Vegas can handle mpeg fairly well.  I've edited mpeg in Premiere
on occassion, but it's gawdawfulslow, even on my 3 GHz P4, and the output
winds up getting transcoded by the software.

Again, it all depends on what you mean by "home video."  Everything I shoot
is home video, and I consider frame accurate editing critical, as well as
maximal video quality.  My final product winds up on DVD, but the technical
quality I achieve is equal to, or better, than commercially-manufactured
DVDs.  Because we watch my DVDs on a large screen TV, image degradation is
very obvious, and lots of people have large screens these days.

Show quoteHide quoteI don't see why there'd be any quality difference between digitizing
in-camera with a D8 or using passthrough on a miniDV -- it's still the same
electronics and software.

Well, sure, but commercially produced DVDs are produced using extremely
high-quality hardware-based mpeg transcoders that do multiple-pass analysis
and are hand-tweaked by human digitizers.

DVD camcorders do single-pass on-the-fly transcoding.

I use tmpgenc to transcode my edited AVIs to mpeg prior to authoring.
Tmpgenc is the best software-based transcoder available under $1000.
Transcoding a 2-hour AVI on my 3 GHz P4, using 2-pass VBR at tmpgenc's
highest quality settings (along with a bit of tweaking) takes a full 24
hours.  The result, however, comes very, very close (and occassionally
surpasses) to the quality of commercially-produced DVDs.  There is no way
that a DVD camcorder, doing single-pass on-the-fly transcoding, is going to
be able to match the quality.

Sorry, but I disagree.  The video from DVD camcorders is inherently worse,
as it is compressed far more than miniDV.  Though, of course, a DV-AVI can
be transcoded to the same quality level as native mpeg from a DVD camcorder,
it can also be transcoded to far higher quality.

That may be because the DVD camcorders available right now simply
aren't very good, rather than any inherent problem with the DVD medium.

I'm not convinced of that.  Tape mechanisms get clogged and jam, tape
drops bits, etc.  Optical media is potentially much more stable.  DVD
media is also a lot cheaper, and more convenient to read into a
computer.  You can also just drop the disc into a set-top DVD player,
making DVD camcorders sort of the successor to VHS camcorders.

That is not necessarily a disadvantage.

8.5 GB, if you use DVD-DL.

That's ok.  Mpeg compression is much more advanced and uses a lot more
processing power than DV25 and can get more quality into fewer bits.
Look at the Sony HD-whatever 1080i camera that uses mini-DV tape at 25
megabits.  I don't hear anyone saying any mini-DV camera can beat a
HDTV 1080i camera with similar optics and electronics despite the
higher compression needed for HDTV.

No I don't think so; there's at least 10x as many $250 camcorders sold
as $1000 camcorders.  I'm personally using a $300 hi-8 camera and if it
hadn't started working unreliably I'd be using it for years to come.

I seem to remember reading that you get better results converting hi-8
tapes directly in a D8 camera (has its own timebase generator or
something like that) than digitizing from the hi-8 camera's analog output.

No need to transcode the output until you're finished editing.

Geez, if you hate mpeg-2 so much, why don't you view the AVI's directly
instead of messing with DVD's?

For most folks, home video is the video equivalent of photo snapshots.
They don't care about frame by frame editing.  Here, look at this clip
of Janie blowing out birthday candles.  They just want the clip to
start and stop in the right place to show the scene they want.  Before
all this digital editing stuff, we did that by dubbing from one
recorder to another using the record and pause buttons.  There was no
thought of frame accuracy which would have needed pro equipment.

No it's not, the D8 camera can do some kind of timebase correction using
info that's lost by the time the video gets to the hi-8 analog output.

Oh come on, people use home DVD recorders and Tivos which are one-pass
and that video looks fine too. 

I don't see why not.  DVD camcorders use mpeg-2 encoder VLSI chips
that, for the specialized task of mpeg-2 encoding, have far more compute
power than your 3 ghz p4.  It's similar to the situation with 3-d graphics
processors.  Also, the camcorders use somewhat less compression (1.4 GB
for 30 minutes or about 5.6 gb for 2 hours), and presumably future ones
are coming that will use DVD-DL so they'll have 2+ GB on those little
discs.  Though I still want one with full sized discs.

Well, that was my point.  A hypothetical BluRay camcorder could run rings
around miniDV.  There just isn't one yet.


Everything I've read indicates that, at least at the present time, tape is a
superior archival solution.  Emprically, I've got beta tapes that I recorded
25 years ago that play as cleanly as the day they were recorded.  On the
other hand, I looked at a DVD I burned 3 years ago and it was riddled with
drop outs (fortunately, I archived the master edit to miniDV).  DVDs are
more convenient to handle, that's true (which is why I watch my projects on
DVD, rather than on miniDV).


True, but no DVD camcorder can use them yet.

The Sony HD prosumer camcorder is a pretty nice piece of engineering and,
hopefully, is a harbinger of good things to come in HD.  Note, too, that the
recording medium is miniDV, though.  It is mpeg2 transcoded, but at an
extremely high bit rate.

Show quoteHide quoteMy first miniDV camcorder (a $1200 TRV-20) gave me higher resolution than
the TR600 it replaced, but at the expense of diminished lowlight performance
and some fairly serious artifcating (however, it was also completely free
from dropouts, which wasn't true of the Hi8 machine).  However, my VX2000 is
truly stunning compared to both the TRV20 and the Hi8 machine -- I get
better color saturation with virtually no chroma noise, far better
resolution and no artifacts at all.

A built-in TBC could make a difference.


If Premiere handled mpegs correctly, it wouldn't transcode at all, except
for cuts that weren't on frame boundaries, transitions and similar
alterations to the substance of the video.  I've heard that Vegas doesn't do
this (though Vegas is less suitable for what I do for other reasons).

Show quoteHide quoteI don't hate mpeg2.  When transcoded by tmpgenc, the quality loss, though
visible to my hypercritical eye, is truly minimal.  I have DirecTV, which is
mpeg, and even extract video from my TIVO, which is a non-standard but
conforming flavor of mpeg, to my computer for viewing on the road.  Mpeg is
fine IF it is well transcoded.  Consumer-grade realtime hardware transcoders
just aren't capable of producing sufficient quality.



Well, it depends on what you mean by "looks fine."  Home DVD recorders don't
look fine to me -- they produce better than VHS-quality, but not as good as
the output of a quality software-based encoder.  I haven't seen standalone
TIVOs, but I've got a DirecTivo which I like very much.  Of course, it's
simply recording the mpeg stream received from the satellite -- DirecTV has
some pretty good hardware transcoders at the headend.  Even then, when the
extracted video is viewed on a good monitor, there are plenty of visible
motion artifacts, occassional solarization, etc.

Show quoteHide quoteThere's a simple reason why not -- mpeg is both forward and backward
predictive.  In order to milk the most out of the limited (compared to the
uncompressed original) bitrate available, the transcoded video has to be
analyzed first, which is why good software transcoders are multipass.  5.6
GB per hour is less than half of the bitrate of DV.

PTRAVEL wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteDV-25, which
I thought I'd break in here, and mention that I had (and have sold) the
Sony DCM-M1 minidisc camera (Sony denies it ever existed, if you ask,
but google it) which was actually quite nice ($2700.00 original MSRP --
I bought mine during the eBay fire sales for $398, now someone's
selling them used (successfully) for $1200!!); aluminum case, aluminum
manual focus ring, 3.5" LCD, stylus, Java, and used 650MB MDs, and used
MPEG2.  I figure this camera would be analoguous to recording on a
disc, but with much less precision required (650MB v. 2GB).

One thing I noticed that it could not do was record reliably while
being jostled.  One example is a run through the glades (skiing) which
was in about 6-12 inches of fresh powder -- I was carrying the camera
in both hands recording the run.  It turned out quite bad.  I'm now
shopping for a MiniDV tape player for just this reason.  You can bounce
it, and it'll still record.

I'd also be leery of calibration issues.  The more abused the camera,
the sooner it'll quit.  Tape cleaning is probably the flip side of this
issue, but it seems to me dirt is an easier problem to deal with than a
stepper motor out of step!

My .02

Matt

Is that really true?  I'd be more inclined to use a solid state camera.

Mini-DV cameras basically have miniature VCR's inside, amazingly
complex and fragile devices, much more so than DVD mechanisms.  They
are not like audio cassettes.  They have a tiny and rapidly spinning
helical scan head and the fancy load/unload mechanism that goes with
it, and all the electromechanical gizmos that get the tape in and out
of the drive.  It can all go out of alignment rather easily.  If
moisture condenses on it, you have to let it dry out before you can
use it or else you can ruin the mechanism, etc.  Be careful.

As an aside, I wonder if you can even buy those 650mb Discam discs any
more.

Though your description of the miniDV mechanism is accurate, your concern
about their robustness really isn't.  Helical scan recording has been around
since 60s (and possibly before -- I don't recall when Ampex introduced it),
and the mechansim is well understood and quite evolved.  Though it is not
unheard of for a truly abused modern camcorder to go out of alignment, it is
a very, very rare thing.  Again, speaking empirically, I've used a range of
cameras, from VHS through Hi8 and a couple of miniDVs, under absolutely
appalling conditions and had a mechanism fail only once -- in Hong Kong when
it, literally, rained on a Hi8 machine.

Probably not.  And it's probably a good thing, too. ;)

After reading through the replies, may I add some further questions?

The suggestion seems to be that for the purpose of moving my old 8mm and Hi8
tapes to digital video I may be better off buying one of the now much less
expensive Hi8 analog video camcorders (since mine is kaput) and use that to
transfer my remaining untransferred tapes.  Is there any sense considering
getting a dedicated Hi8 vcr or would the quality of the digital video be the
same (again considering my ultimate output is for home movies on DVDs)
whether I use a Hi8 video camcorder or a Hi8 vcr?

I understand the dvd discs used for DVD camcorders are 3 inches.  Are there
any considerations involved in using such 3 inch DVDs, such as, will they be
readable when placed in the standard DVD-ROM on a PC?

The card in my video editing PC is capable of transferring either analog or
digital video.  Am I better off transferring video from a digital camcorder
via the PC's card or going with a DVD camcorder and transferring the digital
video from the 3 inch DVD to the PC?  Not having done this or seen it done,
my basic assumption is that I would place the 3 inch DVD in my PC's DVD-ROM
drive and then "copy" the file on the 3 inch DVD in to a directory on my PC.
I infer from the discussion related to my initial question that the file
would be an mpeg file and I would then have to convert that mpeg file to an
avi file - is that correct?  Are there any other issues related to 3 inch
DVD file transfer?

Thanks for all your help.

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