Rating Camcorders
How fragile are hard drive camcorders?
Have just bought a JVC hard disc camcorder and have been told that the drives are very fragile. They are apprently rated to survive a “3g” fall and the PC tech I was talking to said that dropping one was all but guaranteed to shatter the drive. Are they really this fragile?
Thanks,
Hal Littlewood
rugratzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz is correct – but keep in mind that “fragility” is only one technical problem with hard disc drive (HDD) based camcorders.
The four issues that also count (at least in my book):
1) HDD cannot handle prolonged, high levels, of vibration. The source of the vibration can be loud audio – loud music (whether amplified or not); loud crowds, loud engine noise… even vibration from a vehicle’s passenger compartment if the camera is not mounted properly to shield the camcorder from that vibration. The result is the HDD heads will park in an effort to protect the HDD platters. The workaround is to disable the drop-sensor (which can result in a crashed hard drive) or remove the camcorder from the vibration (which can result in no video capture opportunity). If you continue to try capturing video in the high vibration environment, the camera will report a “Buffer Overflow” error message and not record.
2) High altitude (generally over 9,800 feet) usually results in very low air pressure. The hard drive head needs air to “fly” over the platters. When air pressure is too low, this cannot happen. The camcorder will not work. The resolution is to remove the camcorder from the low air pressure environment – which means you could miss the video you wanted to capture.
Neither flash memory nor miniDV tape have these vibration or altitude problems.
3) Consumer HDD based camcorders save their video files to very highly compressed MPEG2 (sometimes modified MPEG2) standard definition files – or if high definition, a very highly compressed consumer version of “AVCHD” (MTS) file types. Since video compression = discarded data = reduced video quality, and this happens at the first step, anything past this can never be “best available video quality”. For that, you need to start with less compression. In the consumer space, this means DV for standard definition or HDV for high definition. In the consumer space, this means miniDV tape. Even the external hard drives and flash memory the pros use write to DV and HDV (Focus Enhancements’ FireStore; Panasonic HVX200 P2 cards). There are a couple of AVCHD- based pro-grade camcorders from Panasonic – but there compression rate is not as severe as the consumer version AVCHD (24mbps vs 17mbps). Consumer flash memory camcorders use these same consumer video data file formats.
4) What are you expecting to use to archive the video captured by the HDD camcorder? What happens if you have not transferred video from the HDD and the camcorder is broken or stolen? With miniDV tape, if you do not re-use the tape, that tape is the archive – fill the tape, take it out, lock it, put in another tape, resume capture. Flash memory is not an acceptable archive media, but fill the memory card, take it out, lock it, put in another card, resume capture, applies. If the camcorder is stolen, you are out only the memory card or tape you left in it – not potentially hours of video captured to the hard drive. If the camcorder is broken, typically, take the tape or card out and use another equivalent camcorder – with HDD, that internal drive is not easily removeable – and you want to know that DriveSavers can recover your data, but they are expensive (maintaining clean rooms is not cheap).
Good luck.
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