Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

The rise of tapeless consumer camcorders can be challenging to sort through. If you’re shopping for a camcorder which should you get? Those that record on miniDVD-Rs? Those that have a small hard-drive which stores the video as files? How about the very small number which record to SD-cards, Compact Flash cards, or memory sticks? And what about old-fashioned tape, too?

As David Pogue writes for the International Herald Tribune, this is a decision which depends on what you want to do with the video after you’ve recorded it. He writes:

… this brings up larger questions: What, exactly, is the point of home video? Why do we make it? Who is the audience?

Some people hope that their children will want to watch these movies when they’re grown, or even their grandchildren. Others shoot video only as a short-term record, intended to be shared on YouTube or a DVD that gets passed around. As the popularity of cameraphone video demonstrates, sometimes the last things people care about are quality and longevity.

That’s why, for some people, the problems with tapeless camcorders are irrelevant. For some purposes, convenience trumps all.

But mere convenience is not everything to everyone. Quality for the professional (and the conscientious consumer) certainly trumps it easily. For these reasons tape is still the medium of choice except when you reach the mid-high end (XD-Cam for Sony, P2 cards for Panasonic, and pro-hard-drive recorders for most other professional video cameras). A final quote from Pogue’s article:

… everyone else should keep the advantages of MiniDV [tape] in mind: storage price, capacity, quality, editability and archivability. The death of tape may be an inevitable part of nature, but it would be nice if that moment didn’t arrive until we had an unequivocally superior replacement.