About how much HD footage can a 1GB memory card hold?

Question

On this camera, if that matters:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/554696-REG/Canon__VIXIA_HF_100_AVCHD_Flash.html

Answer 1

The top bitrate on that camera, at 1920x1080 resolution, is 17Mb/s, which translates to 7.65GB per hour, or 7.84 minutes per GB. This is the top quality mode, which is likely to be better than tape-based MPEG-2, at least in theory. The lowest bitrate for this camcorder is 5Mb/s, which is 2.25GB per hour, or 26.67 minutes per GB.

Don't be worried too much about AVC compression itself.. it's true that the tape-based MPEG-based HDV camcorders record at 25Mb/s in MPEG-2 (broadcast HDTV in the USA is MPEG-2 at 19.4Mb/s or less). But the coding efficiency in AVC is at least twice that of MPEG-2, so (again, in theory), your 17Mb/s video should be comparable to 34Mb/s MPEG-2 video, which is Blu-Ray class.

However, the MPEG-2 standard is simpler and more mature. AVC is pretty heavy horsepower to encode well, and it's still relatively new. So while you may get better-than-HDV quality sometimes, at other times you may see lesser quality, particularly artifacts on fast motion.

But this is a pretty interesting camcorder... if I was going to buy another moderate cost model (I have one higher-end Sony HDV and one consumer class Canon HDV camcorder), I would seriously consider one like the HF-100. The quality of my consumer Canon is very close to the Sony; this is likely better than my Canon (HV10). With support for full 1080/60i and 1080/24p, the easy of transfer to the PC (file transfers from the SD card... imagine that), etc. this is good.

A couple of things to consider, though. Naturally, you need backup, which sooner or later will probably mandate a Blu-Ray drive, maybe some external HDDs as well (I have 2.5TB of external storage on my desk here, in addition to the 1.5TB in my main PC). Editing HDV directly requires a pretty good PC... editing AVCHD directly requires a seriously kick-*** PC. You can get around that by converting to an "intermediate" video CODEC like CineForm, or perhaps editing via a standard def proxy (not my thing, I like seeing the full HD image while editing).  And since AVCHD is relatively new, some video editing tools are not compatible with some manufacturer's camcorders.. yet. So check around, based on the video editor you use.  

Answer 2

The Canon HF100 flash memory AVCHD, huge compression, "high definition" camcorder's manual can be downloaded here:

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/contro...

See page 32 - for recording movies, they don't even bother listing anything less than 2 gig.

See page 36 - again, nothing less than 2 gig, but depending on the video quality, on 2 gig anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes. Half that for 1 gig - itf the camera will accept it.

Too bad AVCHD compresses so much. Good for the LAST step. Not good for the first step.

Answer 3

At the highest compression\lowest quality.......5+ hours..