On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 11:29 +0100, Stroller wrote:
> I don't believe that's the case for video cameras, which usually use
> firewire for video transfer.
>
> I have a customer who bought a DV camcorder with a USB socket & it
> transpired that this socket was only capable of transferring photos
> from the camera (which had both a video and a static "photo" mode).
> Video had to be transferred by firewire.
seems a bit ... restrictive on the part of the manufacturer!
> Although videos appear in the mass storage device of my mum's digicam
> in "proper" video recorders firewire is MUCH more common. If I wanted
> to record video I would expect to be buying a firewire-capable video
> camera; although I might well take Iain Buchanan's advice of 13th
> August 2007 00:00:23 BST to supplant my previous expectations, I
> wouldn't expect USB is a "serious" camcorder.
yes and no, IMHO. Firewire definitely _was_ the best way to get video,
off cheap or expensive video cameras, and therefore it will continue to
be used and provided for a long time. BUT (!) I think the paradigm is
shifting to camera's with more intelligence - consider the "purist" such
as myself, who likes to get exactly what the camera recorded.
Firewire leaves the video stream open to a bit of interpretation - such
as what format to store the file in; exactly what frame to start /
finish on; how to encode the audio, etc. This is all well and good, but
every time you capture the same minute of video, you may end up with a
slightly different output.
Directly downloading the video as a file however lets you get the exact
checksummable file that the camera decided to record. You could do it
10 times and get the same result. The camera can make a direct relation
from each pixel captured by it's CCD('s) to each pixel on each frame in
the video. How it then compresses this video is up the the quality of
the camera, but at least I can be sure that I get the exact, in sync,
video and audio, at the correct aspect ration and resolution.
That's what I think anyway :) It is of course my opinion to prefer USB
filesystem over firewire, and others may differ. I do predict though,
that with the ease and speed of USB filesystem transfers vs firewire,
that any hard drive video camera from the cheapest to the expensive
amateur models will soon have (if not already) this option.
cya,
--
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>
Grubber: Pbbbbpppppbbbbbt!
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