The Difference Between Camcorders
What’s the difference between professional HD camcorders and consumer ones?
I have a Canon Vixia HF M30 camcorder, a consumer camcorder that is fairly on the cheaper end, but shoots in full 1080p HD.
I am planning to shoot a feature length documentary this summer that I will submit to festivals. While the content is much more important than the picture, I would really like it to look beautiful, while sticking to digital HD. I’m planning to buy an external microphone and lights to help.
What are the other differences between consumer camcorders and professional ones, and if you know, what makes these differences?
I realize there is aperture and shutter control and stuff like that. What’s the difference in the picture quality? Do they simply offer more manual control?
Data rate/compression, lens quality, physics.
The major difference is the data rate and you really need a base-line to compare. The MiniDv tape based camcorders recorded 13 gig of data per hour for a 720 x 480 frame. This format was uncompressed in the brightness channel, and had a very low compression in the color channels.
To equal this data rate, HD would need 78 gigs/hour.
Your camera is at the highest end of consumer camcorder data rates at 11 gigs/hour. You have 15% LESS data than MiniDv for a frame size that is 6 times bigger. In fact, if you have the editing horsepower, you would be better to record on MiniDv and up-convert to HD. (One of the reasons I frequently refer to consumer HD cameras as “Crapcorders”)
Pro cameras like the XF100 start to climb in their data rate from 24 gigs/hour.
The data rate is important. All digital cameras under $20,000 use compression and the HD format uses compression based on reference frames and interpreted frames. As few as 2 frames a second are captured as full frame images, the remaining 28 frames only measure a threshold of difference between the reference ahead and behind. Lower compression=more full reference frames=better quality=more data to process, and store.
Additionally, pro cameras have bigger lenses of better quality. Going back to the MiniDv GL-2, to get a range of 700mm in a zoom, canon L series lens for my 5D would cost me over $9000 for just the lens.
And the pro cameras are really three high quality cameras in one. Light is split and sent to three different CCD sensors under different filters. Rather than the hit and miss of a standard camera, every pixel can measure every visible wavelength.
This covers the $2500 to $10,000 cameras. In the mid $20,000 range you start to get full, uncompressed, HD cine cameras like the RED, that generate 4mp of data per frame (almost a gig/minute)
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