Notes On Video

Holy C$%^!!! Less than a week after I saw the Sony XDCAM HD cameras, Sony has announced a couple of low-end HD camcorders that record to DVD or hard drive. These are at the high-end of the consumer line (they have a micro-phone in, which the current HDR-HDC3 does not.) Questions I have; how will they work with Final Cut Pro (will they?) and how big is the hard drive on the HDR-SR1 and what's the quality difference between the HDR-SR1 and the HDR-UX1 . A posting on CDRinfo suggests that the DVD is 10MBPs and the Hard Drive is 12MBPs, so the Hard Drive should have higher quality video (though at larger file sizes.) I'd love to go tapeless, though I see a problem with making backups etc. Particularly with the hard drive model; would I save the stuff off to DVD's or just buy lots of hard disk space? Update: Looks like the Hard Drive model has a 30GB drive.

Last week I went to a seminar that Apple and Sony put on for XDCAM HD , which is Sony's Pro-HD system that uses optical drive technology to record video. There's more to it than that, but for me, the idea of doing away with tape is appealing. A really neat feature; connect the camera to your computer (using FireWire 800) and then using a Sony supplied plug-in for Final Cut Pro, it will show you icon's for all the clip segments on the disc. You can choose parts of those segments to then transfer (capture) to the computer, and then use for editing. Pretty damn neat; but, the cheapest camera is $15,999. Just as well, I only bought my tape based HD camcorder last year, and I can't afford a camera that expensive!