Yes that is a really cheesey pun based on a famous line from “Hamlet”, but it is very relevant to this article and a really good question when it comes to buying a camcorder. Ever since HDTV first came out we’ve seen massive adoption of the technology into peoples homes in the form of PlayStation 3, HD DVD players, BluRay players HD cable boxes and Home Theatre PCs. The technology really has gone leaps and bounds to get where it is today. mostly because of the steep price drop of HD LCD panels in 2006/2007 which have made them popular and a standard for a new TV not only for image quality but the size advantage too.
However, storing and creating your own memories and media in HD is a real technology gap at the moment and definatly not mainstream … yet. For example if you shoot a video clip with a standard digital camcorder you could fill a DVD with 2 hours of video, given that a dvd is 4 gigabytes of data. DVD resolution is 480p which means there are 480 horizontal lines progressivly on the screen at any one time to build the image, HD resolution is 1080p so there are 1080 lines of data on the screen at the same time. So if you have twice the amount of lines they’ll need to be twice as long to maintain the correct aspect ratio of the image. Which means HD will need four times the amount of data as DVD quality. So now your 2 hours of film in HD will require 16GB of space not 4GB.
So what does this mean to you? Well firstly you really don’t have an option of burning to disc that can hold 16GB of movie because HD/bluray burners are just too expensive at the moment and secondly for your computer to edit a HD film needs 4x more processing time and storage space to edit a HD movie. So if any of you have edited standard move you’ll know that it can take a long time to convert frames and do some tasks, no different in HD, only that it takes >4 times longer to edit.
If you already have a HD camcorder then you should be aware that you may have paid extra for something you’ll likely not be able to use for a while and even though the software you get with a camcorder can burn a movie on to a DVD you will be creating a movie which can be produced by a standard camcorder $100-$500 cheaper.
Its a real technology gap at the moment and I would tell most people to either wait or buy a standard camcorder for now because you’ll probably find when the technology is available that can utilse HD movies there will be much better camera available. However there are people that can connect a laptop or a PC to their HDTV in this case and only this case can you enjoy your raw HD media on your HDTV. Either that or buy a massive external drive to hold the RAW format movie until there is a consumer friendly way to burn discs at full quality.
Hope this was helpful, leave a comment,
