How much footage can you fit onto a 60GB camera harddrive?

Question

I am thinking of moving over from Mini DV to a HDD camera, any one have any experience with this type of camera, how much footage can it hold and at what quality?

Answer 1

If you know which camcorder you are thinking about, go to that manufacturer's web site and download the manual. Stay in "high Quality" mode. There will be a table that shows how much time you can record in the different video quality modes.

Be aware that hard drive based camcorders save to a very highly compressed MPEG2 video format and that qaulity will not be as good as miniDV tape (DV uses very little compression).

video compression = discarded video data = reduced video quality.

Also be aware that hard drive based camcorders will have problems with loud audio environments (the vibration from the loud audio causes the internal hard drive to stop recording). They also have high altitude problems.

If you want to consider something different from miniDV tape and are OK with the reduced video quality, skip past hard drive camcorders and look at flash memory camcorders. They, like miniDV tape do not have the vibration or altitude issues that HDD camcorders have - but they do use the high compression MPEG2 files like HDD... The Canon FS series for standard definition.

I presume you are not looking at high definition camcorders - the AVCHD implementation on HDD or flash memory camcorders is not real good.