Hi Def Camcorder questions??

Question

What type of burner do I need to burn the movies I make w/ a 1080p hi def camcorder? Anything special?

Answer 1

Not necessarily.  You can put high definition content on a standard DVD; your constraints are not in quality but in size. (Yes - a 12x DVD player has a faster read speed than a 2x Blu-Ray player, and most are 1.5x). The Blu-Ray advantage comes in size, and HD video is very big.

If you want to save money, consider doing this:

If you want to get relative short movies onto a disc, DVDs are the best way to go, and you can probably fit around 15 minutes of HD footage on a disc. You can increase this drastically by using the H.264 codec to encode your video. With minimal quality loss, you can halve the size of your video file.

So unless you're trying to fit a feature length HD movie on a single disc, you can probably get away with a DVD burner (you might want to consider dual-layer). If not, then Blu-Ray is pretty much your only option. You can get internal or external burners for both DVD and Blu-Ray.

Answer 2

grgurmg is correct on everything but the availability of BluRay burners...

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.h...

Not cheap... but available to mere mortals.

Answer 3

It depends on what you mean? First off, do you mean a burner for your computer or a standalone for your entertainment center?

Either way, you'd be able to burn the footage to DVD, but it will -NOT- be in High Definition anymore.. only regular Standard Defitiion (DVD) quality.  If you want to burn High Definition video in High Definition, right now your options are pretty much limited to a computer Blu-Ray Recording (burning) drive. And to view the video on your television you of course would need a Blu-Ray player as well as an HDTV.  Furthermore, only certain software packages are even capable of authoring Blu-Ray discs.. so be careful there.

As far as I know, there are no standalone Blu-Ray recorders available for the average consumer yet. Here's a few examples of computer Blu-Ray recording drives...

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/51...

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/52...

But to record the footage in standard quality.. there should be a way to output standard video from the camera, in which case any burner would suffice.

--------- Edit -----------

Misread me a bit, Nu'uanu. :)

What I meant by standalone is one that doesn't need to be attached to a computer... like the DVD player/recorders they currently sell to be hooked up straight to your TV ;)

But yeah, USB/firewire is also an option if you don't want to or can't go internal.

As far as fitting HD onto DVD, it's true that's very doable... however it can only then be played back on a computer or (what I neglected to consider) a Blu-Ray player capable of playing the HD footage off a DVD. I'd suspect most can providing it's a supported codec.  Aside from the side concideration though, a video would need to be compressed below any bitrate limitations there may be for DVD reading.