A Nice Little List of HD Video Media

Nowadays we use a lot of different media, types of cameras and other means to record video for our productions, and there are so many different media types and possibilities, it gets hard to keep track of them all.  I have rounded up all the different kinds of media and am going to try to demystify what they are and how they record, so that you can make the correct decision when it comes to buying equipment for your productions, big or small.

HDV

This is probably one of the most popular consumer HD video formats to hit the scene early on, HDV tapes are the same size as MiniDV, except you can record up to 1920×1080 instead of standard definition.  Cameras like the Sony HDR-FX1 and Canon Vixia HV series prove to be great prosumer and consumer cameras alike, and really give you a good range of options and controls to shoot your movies on.  Although HDV does have kind of a crappy compression through firewire, if you have the right components, you can capture via your HDMI stream for a very nice clear capture.  Check out this PVC article for more info on firewire vs HDMI capture with HDV media.

Internal HDD

These cameras are mostly consumer based, but they nevertheless are quite handy to shoot with.  They come in HD as well as SD, and allow you to plug the camera in and pull your files off of your camera directly to your desktop.  This is a way faster way of accessing files for editing rather than having to capture in realtime.  Depending on the camera, you can choose to to record in the variety of formats that your camera offers (usually not too many), as well as the different frame rates such as 60i, 30i, 30p, or some kind of film type format such as “CineRate” or “film frame” or something like that.  These are not to be confused with the big brother of this type of media below, the Firestore.

Firestore

These are a little pricey but they are worth the convenience if you got the bucks to justify buying it.  At around $1,500, Firestores give you the convenience of recording to disk in realtime (off of any camera with a firewire port) in a multitude of formats, and lets you detach and edit literally minutes after you are done with your shoot.  Formats include RawDV, AVI Type 1, AVI Type 2, AVI Type 2 24p, Matrox AVI, Canopus AVI, Avid OMF, or Pinnacle AVI. It also supports native HDV720 24p, 25p, 30p, 50p & 60p recording in “.m2t” and 24p, 25p &30p in “.mov” file formats.  I know that might be a lot to swallow, but my point is, this is the massively professional hard drive recorder that you can virtually take to any shoot and plug directly into any camera, any time.

SDHC Cards

First we can look at the SDHC (Secure Digital High-Capacity) cards, which are basically a higher capacity version of the regular SD cards, and are used in video cameras shooting to AVCHD formats, and start at a size of 4GB minimum.  This provides the camera to shoot to probably one of the smallest forms of media available for video cameras, around the size of a postage stamp, and can be popped out and stuck in your memory card reader to transfer files directly to the hard drive for editing.  These also have a high data transfer rate as well, and you can get them up to 64GBs of space, possibly more in the near future.

SxS Cards

This is Sony’s new card, released in 2007 specifically along with the Sony PMW-EX1 and EX3.  It is the competitor to  the P2 cards from Panasonic, coming in sizes from 8GB to 32GB and they support up to an 800 Mbit/sec data transfer rate and a 1.5Gbit/sec max DTS.

CF Cards

CF Cards have been around forever… I think actually before SD cards were in the picture.  They have since evolved into something much better than their 8mb predecessors, and are the card of choice for the RED cameras as well as The infamous 5D MK II.  They range in size from very, very small to 64GB, and have a transfer rate of 45Mbit/sec, which isn’t that fast, but they are very reliable cards.

P2 Cards

I have actually used an HPX-500 before, and it made P2 cards quite possibly one of my favorite medias to deal with.  It actually made going back to HDV a very difficult process.  These work a lot like the SxS cars and the hard drives, except that cards are a hell of a lot more expensive.  These are made proprietorially for Panasonic cameras and they can hold up to 64GB on a card and can record on all formats up to 1080p, but as the format gets higher resolution, the minutes that you can record to the cards gets lower and lower, ultimately 1 minute per 1GB for 1080p video.

There is new media being developed all the time, and sooner or later there is going to be something bigger and better, or version 3.0, 4.0, or whatever that boosts data rate or capacity.  Who knows… there might be some massive 1 TB flash media card being developed as you read this getting ready to be debuted at NAB 2010… fact is this industry is always expanding, and new technologies are always on the rise.  This list is by no means over…. its just starting.