HOWEVER fancy the camcorder you buy, you are still faced with the daunting prospect of editing your footage. And this means poring over a pile of (probably unlabelled) DV tapes, winding back and forth through them to find the best bits, and re-recording them onto a PC before you can splice them together. It’s a drudge of a task that’s enough to put off all but the most determined of home movie directors.
Help will soon be at hand for the would-be auteur, however. The next generation of camcorders is doing away with videotape in favour of miniature hard drives or memory cards, which are becoming capacious enough to record high-quality video. The upshot of this is that footage can be edited in the camera, instead of on a separate PC.
For the video industry, it has been a long haul getting to this level of convenience. Twenty-five years ago, analogue cameras and their separate portable recorders were bulky, shoulder-crushing beasts. Smaller versions evolved, such as C-format VHS and Hi-8, but none was nearly so diminutive as the matchbox-sized DV (“digital video”) tape, which exploded onto the scene a decade ago. DV tapes record an hour of near-broadcast-quality pictures.
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But although small may be beautiful, it isn’t the whole story. Editing DV tape still requires you to wind through to the sequence of interest before capturing it to a computer disc for editing. Capturing the entire tape before picking the best bits is also an option, but as video capture usually works in real time, it will take as long to transfer the footage as it did to shoot it. What’s more, it will clog up your hard drive with tens of gigabytes of video. This is all painfully slow compared to the near-instant access people are used to with CDs and DVDs, or the editing functions that MiniDiscs and MP3 players offer as well.
The obvious answer is to make camcorders work like a MiniDisc or MP3 player, so that they give instant playback of whatever bit of video you want, and allow you to bin, trim or reshuffle shots. But until now, the sheer quantity of video data has been a barrier. To produce images of sufficient colour depth and resolution to match broadcast quality, the camera has to record 187 megabytes every minute. DV manages this by using a video compression system called DCT, which allows a one-hour tape to store the necessary 11 gigabytes.
A decade ago, 11 gigabytes was an unthinkable amount of disc or chip memory for a consumer device. So various attempts to make hard-disc-based camcorders came to nothing: they either could not record quality footage for long enough, or managed only VHS-quality for longer periods.
Fast-forward to now, and hard disc capacities can easily cope with the quality and length of video recording users want. JVC’s upcoming hard-disc camcorder, the GZ-MC200 Everio, marries the high-quality MPEG-2 compression system used in DVDs with the IBM/Hitachi Microdrive hard disc that is at the heart of the iconic iPod music player.
A 4-gigabyte Microdrive holds an hour of MPEG-2 video, streaming at 8.5 megabits per second. Advances in MPEG’s compression techniques mean its quality is just as good as DV’s 25 megabits-per-second footage. At VHS-quality, the drive stores 5 hours of video. The Microdrive cartridge is removable and can be bought independently, so it is possible to lengthen recording time indefinitely – at a price. Editing can be done inside the camera, which JVC thinks will be a big selling point. “You can edit your holiday movies on the plane home,” says JVC manager Masanori Kitami. The Everio will be available in the summer, with an 8-gigabyte version to follow.
Sony’s latest camcorders, meanwhile, house a miniature DVD recorder. To keep the camera small, Sony records on 8-centimetre DVDs instead of the usual 12-centimetre discs. The discs hold an hour of video on each side. Editing is more limited than with hard-disc-based camcorders, but the camera automatically finds and uses any free space on the disc.
Panasonic is pushing for a camcorder with no moving parts whatsoever. Its latest D-Snap cameras use the MPEG-4 compression system, which will allow 45 minutes of VHS-quality video to be stored on a 512-megabyte memory card. Deleting dud shots is as easy as sorting music in an MP3 player.
“Panasonic is now pushing for a camcorder with no moving parts whatsoever”
But we ain’t seen nothing yet, say industry commentators. As better compression reduces the number of bits that have to be stored, and microchip memory capacities double every two years – often halving in price at the same time – the scene is set for memory-card-based MPEG-2 camcorders that will deliver an hour of broadcast-quality, matching DV.
Tapeless camcorders let you edit without using a computer
