MiniDV or Flash Camcorder?—By shocksuspect
I want to make my own short films. I want to try several types, everything from simply talking to the camera, to choreographing fight scenes. I want them to be a reasonable quality (the kind you would expect from a private film-maker). I’ve been itching to get my hands on a camcorder but I don’t know whether to get a Flash or a MiniDV. I hear MiniDV seems to be more popular with film-makers but I don’t understand why. You have to keep buying tapes (whereas with an SD card all you have to do is take the footage off and delete it from it) and Flash camcorders still can shoot in 1080P. That and I find getting capturing footage off MiniDV’s is a fiddly process which takes just as long to capture as it did to film it.

So what I wanna know is if I’m being totally wrong. Is there something holy about MiniDV’s that I don’t know about? Do some film-makers shoot using Flash tech? Would I be making a serious mistakes if I bought a Flash camcorder instead of a MiniDV taking into account what I want to do? Please help, I’m so confused.

Best Answer—By Iridflare
MiniDV is higher in quality because it does not have to compress a file for a memory card.
Flash on the other hand is cheaper because you don’t need to buy tapes.
MiniDV do take just as long to capture as it did to film it. Also take up more space on your computer.
So here is your best option. Get a camcorder that has both MiniDV and SD card.
My Sony Handycam has both and will take pictures.Just about all video compression techniques are “lossy”, that is, they throw data away. The compression schemes used with memory cards (MPEG-2 and 4) are very lossy and the result is that movement and lighting changes suffer – your talking head shots will be fine, but your choreographed fight scenes won’t. If you’re going to make “real” films you’ll be doing a lot of editing – MPEG was designed as a delivery format and doesn’t take kindly to being edited.

fwiw, you don’t have to keep buying tapes – you can write over the old ones. As for the time taken to capture the video – start the capture and go off and do something else while you’re waiting. If you’re planning to do this properly the time spent capturing video will be a small percentage of the total.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...