What is the highest resolution I can hope to get with a miniDV format camcorder?

Question

Sounds like High Def camcorders and recording directly to hard drives take forever to process and frames are lost, therefore still and slow motion quality is sacrificed? Is this correct? Thanks

Answer 1

It's sort of correct, but there are a number of misconceptions.

"and frames are lost" - the compression used by these camcorders relies on throwing away most of the frames and just keeping a few "real" frames called i-frames.  The missing frames are reconstructed from information about what changed between the i-frames.

"High Def camcorders and recording directly to hard drives take forever to process" - all that reconstructing the missing frames takes a lot of processing power, so editing on an underpowered PC is tedious.

"therefore still and slow motion quality is sacrificed" - You're never going to get good stills from video, regardless of what format you're shooting in.  If you need stills, even a very cheap digicam will give better results.  I've never tried slow motion with this sort of compressed footage but I'd expect it to be inferior to MiniDV.

And to answer the question - MiniDV resolution is fixed at 720x480 for NTSC and 720x576 for PAL.