Comments on: Just say no to HDD and MiniDVD camcorders

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:26:16 +0000

Hi Terry,

My wife and I have an eight week old and bought a mini dvd camcorder to capture our son’s big moments. The first disks I used were TDK DVD-R’s. I removed the disks before filling recording space to record a project at work. This may have been my mistake exposing the disks to more handling and dust. I have two of these TDK DVD-R disks with footage that the camcorder will return a message saying the disk may scratched or dirty. The camcorder will not read these. I tried cleaning the lense with alcohol and using a lint free cloth to remove as much dust as possible from the disks and still no luck. There appear to be no visible scratches. Should I try buffing the disks with the tootpaste method??? Any help you can offer would be appreciated.

Happy Holidays,
Erik

By: Wil

Wil — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:16:45 +0000

Hi I was just searching for some info on camcorder formats and came across this site. I just bought a used panasonic D300 camcorder and found out how much more work is needed with a minidvd camcorder. So many limitations and time consuming processes like having, pre-formatting the disks before your trips, only 20mins on 1 side of the disk, finalizing the disk while plugging into the AC to name a few. Luckily I paid a really great price so it offsets the downsides. Plus it’s my first unit and it has full manual control and optical stabilization. It’s still great to try shooting in different settings out. I want to say that there is a great free software called SUPER that converts virtually any file to any file. I works great and it’s free!

By: Ulrich Muzyk

Ulrich Muzyk — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:56:20 +0000

I am fairly new to Adobe Premiere CS3. I transferred my old VHS onto DVD-RAM using a Panasonic HD Recorder. Since Premiere cannot read VRO files I simple renamed the extention to AVI, i.e. file.avi
Now I can import it to Premiere and it looks fine. The only problem that I encountered is that the audio is out of sync with the video. Is this a wrong setting in Premiere, i.e. set up of the project?

I can view the file.avi in Windows media player, Nero show view and others without this problem.
Does anyone have a hint what to do? Thank you.

Best Regards
Ulrich

By: John Hardin

John Hardin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:03:24 +0000

Hi Terry, Help!!

Terry, I have just completed transferring my VHS tapes to DVD-R discs using a Panasonic DMR-ES35V DVD recorder. My old RCA VHSC camcorder has completely quit on me and I am looking for a hybrid digital camcorder. Please suggest a camcorder that is user friendly and will transfer to my Pansonic DMR. My DMR has a 4-pin 1EEE 1394 port. Will the 3 inch disc transfer to the 5 inch DVD-R or DVD-RW directly from a digital camcorder to the DMR? What format will I need? The Panasonic manual does state that it will transfer digital video via the DV port 4-pin 1394.

Please help!!!!!!!

Respectfully,

John Hardin

By: Francis Metivier

Francis Metivier — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:12:04 +0000

All i want to do is transfert my mini-DVD into Final Cut Pro to make a little movie….
i tried to change the DVD (.VRO) to MP4 with hand brake and most of the time i don t get all the scenes and anyway Final Cut Pro cannot read it….
i could definitly used some advise…. thanks… francis

By: Ben-Jammin

Ben-Jammin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:36:24 +0000

Can a hard drive camcorder with USB and HDMI but no FireWire deliver a live feed to a computer?

By: Appleman

Appleman — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:32:30 +0000

Hi Terry. I am just looking to purchase a new camcorder and was eyeing the new JVC Everio 60GB HDD model (With the dock). I recently had to use a mini DVD cam for editing and was extremely frustrated with importing it into Premiere Pro 2 (my primary video editor). I fully understand the quality reduction with the MOD (mpeg2) file format that this camera uses and can live with that. This camera comes with a dock which has USB 2.0 AND Firewire outputs on it. Do you think that i will be able to play in the footage over the firewire using premiere’s built in capture utility just like a miniDV camcorder. This would hopefully circumvent the conversion process that may be required if I take the traditional “Copy from the Hard Drive” approach. I am using Windows in case it matters. Thanks for your time, great blog, have a good one.

By: denise

denise — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:26:02 +0000

Thanks for the tip on Handbrake. I, silly moi, just bought a minidvd camcorder. But thanks to your tip, it won’t be much of a problem converting to mp4 format. Cheers and thanks.

By: Julian

Julian — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:51:44 +0000

I too was gutted to find that I have to muck about with the files to import into iMovie, but I have a question on a slightly different angle. I bought a JVC 40gb HDD camera before I went skiing last week and was gutted to find the picture quality, in my opinion, absolutely awful. I had it on the highest setting and still the edges of objects are blurred by loads of horizontal lines. Does anybody else find this a problem? And if not, do you want to buy a JVC 40gb camera?

By: philldo

philldo — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:35:38 +0000

I agree with Terry. I try to convince everyone I know that plans on editing their footage to steer clear of mini-DVD camcorders.

MPEG Streamclip has been a life saver for situations where a client hands me a miniDVD or DVD to edit. Demuxing to mpeg2 (finalcut will edit m2v) or transcoding it to DV has worked great.

By: Ben-Jammin

Ben-Jammin — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:50:21 +0000

Question:

Is it at all possible for hard drive camcorders to offer a live feed to a computer?

My situation is I’m trying to do some stop-motion animation, and I have this frame-grabbing program, but in my research I’ve discovered that it will only work with a DV stream, since it just grabs a frame of what the camcorder sees at the moment. I fear more and more that this is impossible with my new hard drive camcorder that I got for Christmas. It’s a Sony HDR-SR7, but you can only connect it through USB, no FireWire. Are there any solutions other than to buy a new camcorder?

(I realize that this blog may not be the best place for this question, but thanks anyway!!!)

By: MILT R SMITH

MILT R SMITH — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:04:11 +0000

HOW MUCH HORSEPOWER to view & edit short home hi-def(720p) video clips? My desktop has Intel 2.66GHz processor, 256kb GeForce graphics card, 2Gigs main memory, and I either get good audio with herky-jerky video, or video displaying every 3rd or 4th frame with fair audio. I have the latest Quicktime software for Windows with all options. Why am I having this problem? Motherboard manufacturer & Quicktime support say hardware should run this fine. What is the problem?

By: MIKE

MIKE — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:25:09 +0000

Hi, Terry…love the review on the iPhone. Just to let you and everyone else know that I had bought the JVC Everio HDD months ago and overall am pleased with it. My main reason for purchasing this item was that I was getting tired of buying tapes for an analog camcorder that I have and having various events on the same tape. I’m not big into editing, which is why I chose this type of recorder having 30 GB of HD that I can record, download, organize, and then burn DVDs. Like I said, I’m not big into editing, so according to what you and everyone else are saying about these types of recorders, this might not be an appropriate one to have, but it works great for me, the simple shoot, organise, and burn DVD type-of-guy:)

Keep up the great product reviews!

MIKE

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 19:13:56 +0000

Hi..Thanks Terry, should have read this before present time. Got Sally a new camcorder for Christmas mini dvd. Of course her MacBook will not take the mini-dvd’s. GGRRRHHHH I think she could handle the file requirements Ok, are you aware of a USB reader for a MacBook that can handle the discs?

Thanks.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:17:43 +0000

ARrrrrg.
Bought the Sony HDD with 40 gig drive,…. not happy with the video output AFter 10 days I went back to Future Shop and upgraded to the Canon HG10 … not happy with the file format issues but did like the output. However, cannot play the HD files on any of my DVD players (the video is in AVCHD format) only on my computer.

But now I know why the stupid software included a Backup Tool (version1.0) that allows you to move the files back and forth on the hard drive so you can play the videos via the camera.

The other issue regading the HDD camcorders is the drive reliablity – the extra warranty is another $200 for 2 years. Not sure what I am going to do, but will research more cameras with a focus on the file formats!