Posted on by Terry White

Good quality memory card that doesn’t break the bank

transcend

I’ve really been getting into using my Canon VIXIA HF10 HD camcorder more and more lately. I only had one SDHC card which was 8GB in capacity. I wanted to be able to at least record up to two hours on one card at the highest quality setting. So that meant upgrading to a 16GB card. I usually buy name brand memory cards for my digital photography work. My usual brand of choice is SanDisk. I use other name brands too, but the SanDisk cards have all served me well with no failures to date.

hf10

I was pricing the Class 6 (the speed I wanted for HD video work) SanDisk cards when I realized that the 8GB card I had been using all along was NOT a name brand card. That got me thinking, do I really need to spend the extra $$ on a memory card to get quality? Usually I don’t chance it. However, the proof was in my hand that I might be able to break tradition this time. So I did a little comparison shopping and opted to get a Transcend 16GB SDHC Class 6 card. It was literally half the price of the SanDisk card! It was also getting decent reviews on Amazon.com (a site where people can be brutally honest and not hold anything back when writing reviews). So I took a chance!

The results so far

It’s still early in this game. I’ve only been using the new Transcend cards for about 2 weeks now. However, they’ve performed perfectly. Again, it’s early and ANY card can die at any time. However, that’s the point! Any card can die at any time! So if you have a decent not so known brand that works and is compatible and seems to have a low failure rate as far as the reviews go, why not save the money? I did just that! I bought TWO of the 16GB SDHC class 6 cards for the price of ONE SanDisk card. So far so good! If the card ever dies I will report back here.

Once I record my video footage, I simply pop the memory card out of the Canon HF10 and pop it into my SanDisk 12-in-1 card reader on my Mac Pro. From there I fire up Premiere Pro CS4 and edit right off the card in the native AVCHD format. I will never go back to tape again! This workflow totally rocks! See it in action here:

[flv:http://media.libsyn.com/media/cspodcast/podcast-PR-AVCHD.mp4 625 353]

Here’s what I can record at with a 16GB SDHC card on the VIXIA HF10:

17FPs FXP (highest quality setting) 2 hours 6 minutes

12FPs XP+ 2 hours 53 minutes

7FPs SP 4 hours 48 minutes

5FPs LP 6 hours 8 minutes

Check out all of my latest gear recommendations here.

12 Replies to “Good quality memory card that doesn’t break the bank”

  1. We just got this camera and are editing the footage on a MacBookPro with Final Cut Studio. So far, so good! It’s amazing what a camera the size of a can of soda can do nowadays!

  2. Terry,
    I’m a small business owner with a non existent IT department and I’m trying to find the best way to securely backup my company’s information. My western digital external hard drive stopped working on Friday so I was unable to backup my pc. Do you know of any cost efficient ways to backup my information online any advice would be appreciated?

    Thanks

  3. Cool.

    But the nice thing about tape (and one of the reasons why I have not switched to digital) is that the backup is pretty solid on the tape for decades to come (unless your house burns down …). To backup the digital files is no fun and one has to be serious about it. HDs can loose data just by sitting on a shelf for prolonged time, so ….. do you write your edits back to tape?

  4. I think we have been channeling each other, Terry.

    This year I decided to switch camera equipment from Olympus to Nikon, for a number of reasons. Both of my Olympus cameras used CF cards, and I had bought almost all SanDisks. My first Nikon camera, though, was a D90, which as you know uses SD cards. I found as you did that the SanDisk SD cards are ultra expensive. Also as you did, I saw that the Transcend cards were considerably cheaper, so I picked up a couple of 8GBs to go with my D90. So far they have been wonderful. Reasonably fast, very reliable and cheap. How can that be beat? I also picked up a PNY 16 GB SD card at Sam’s a while back and it rocks as well. It will hold over 1,000 .NEFs, which meant that I was able to shoot an entire wedding (it was a small one) on one card last weekend. My time front is somewhat limited (about five months), but at this point, I’d recommend Transcend or PNY cards to anyone.

  6. I just ordered the memory from Amazon. Way cheaper than my local BB for Sandisk.

    Thanks Terry for the great info

  7. Terry,

    and what do you do with HDs after you are done ingesting your movie? You leave them on the shelf and hope that the data will still be there in let say 3 years?

    The thing is that I ingest my tape to HD as well and leave it there, not worrying about anything, because the tape is in a safe place ….

    Sure it takes longer to ingest the tape and is not as flexible, but as you said to each of his own …

    Thanks,

    Marek

  8. Marek,
    I backup video projects, just like any other data to hard drives. The backups are rotated on a regular basis. Now if you’re talking archival, that’s a different story. My video projects (raw footage) are NOT archived. In the last 15 years of doing video, not once have I had to return back to source footage (I have tons of tapes sitting there as proof that I’ve never once put back in). Again, I’m not suggesting that this is the case for you or anyone else, but it is the case for me. So my workflow is a lot different than yours.

    Tape (yes even digital tape) can become demagnetized over time too! Tape, like any other media will not last forever.

    If tape is working out for you, great!

    Have a great one.

    T

  9. I heard that this company Transcend has pioneered some of the flash memory technology. Even if that isn’t true, they are not a knock-off company. I trust my photos to their media. I bought two of their 8GB high speed compact flash cards and they have been rock solid (even when hiking with them under not-so-gentle conditions for a month).

    From Wikipedia:
    “Transcend was the first Taiwanese memory module manufacturer to receive ISO 9001 certification[1] and the first company in the world to offer a lifetime warranty on all of its memory modules[citation needed].”
    – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend

  10. Terry,

    I never said I love tapes or that they are great without any complaint. I probably don’t like them as much as you do, the only difference is that I want to have a safe access to my kids footage.

    I just refuse to take a chance that the HD will work 5 years down the road …. will not you be disappointed if one day you find out that the great shot of your kids is not available due to failing media in any shape or format?

    I truly wish there would be some new technology coming through the pipelines which would solve this nagging issue of digital world.

    Regards,

    Marek

  11. Marek,
    I think that’s the point your missing or perhaps I’m not communicating effectively. I don’t entrust any important keepsakes (photos, music, movies) to any ONE media. I have my important memories backed up and archived in multiple locations on multiple drives. Hard Drives are dirt cheap these days and EVERYTHING will eventually fail (including tapes). So the key here is to not trust any one thing to last forever. I find it much easier to copy files to multiple hard drives (heck it’s even automated via software) than to worry about tapes and making copies of tapes. So, I’m not too worried if “one drive fails some day” because whatever was on that drive (it was important to me) is on another drive somewhere else.

    There is no perfect solution to this problem. However, for me the solution is not tape.

    T

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