Quote:
Originally Posted by vidvicious
One model will suit your needs .. the Canon Xh A1
if you can afford it .. opt for the Canon XH G1 .. basically all of the features of the A1 plus a bunch of upgrades you'll love, like a lens stabilization and HD SDI, SMPT TIMECODE in/out, Genlock and many more extra features makes htis camcorder well worth the extra cash.
BTW in my 20 + years as a camera technicians I have seen all kinds of tape based problems when shooting MiniDV .. In the last year alone I've lost 3 shoots to bad tape. My Partners made the mistake of buying sony rather then Panasonic tape stock . huge difference in quality,, hence the price difference .. nothing sucks more then getting back to the edit suite only too see that the start of your tape is fucked with drop outs, and has resulted in a sub standard recording .. or better yet the whole tape is digitised and rendered useless. All because you didn't take that 3 sec to check record when you started, But even that isn't a fail safe. BAck up Hard Drive is a life saver .. oh and if the drive fails you;ll know before before you even get the the next shot. A camera on record hardly ever gives you an error due to drop outs.
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Wow, my experience is so different than yours. I have been using the same brand of Panasonic professional tapes in my Sony FX-1 for years (and other cameras in the years before that) and I have never had a completely bad tape yet. One thing I make sure is I never record to the first thirty seconds of a Mini-DV tape, and drop outs are so very infrequent. And I recently recaptured and re-edited tapes I filmed on literally ten years ago that were simply stored in a storage place and they were pristine as the day they were shot. I am a pretty big believer in tape as a medium and long term backup. The physical media is so much more reliable and lasts longer than a hard drive does. Hard drives in my estimation are just temporary storage to edit on, and not a long term archiving solution.
I mean, come on, hard drives fail all the time! With the amount I film, no hard drives can realistically store all my raw video without having a giant rack of multiple 1 or 2 Tb hard drives sucking up power and taking up space that keeps growing every month. And backing up the data means doubling or tripling that amount of space! I may go tapeless eventually for a more efficient workflow, but I have to wrap my head around having my precious data stored in so flimsy a media with redundant backups and I just can't see dedicating the space for it.