My company is looking into investing into some DV cams on the cheap and have asked me to find something. I have absolutlely no knowlage of DV cam models other than the ones we been using for the past 6-7years. (Cannon XMVi's ? & XM1's?) What im looking to find out is the following... What storage medium would be considered the best? I have been looking at a JVC cam that sports an internal 60gb hard drive, are these drives considered to be reliable in the sense of being suseptable to bad sectors and such, I would be inclined to think so, but how much would this affect the recording or playback? Is USB connectivity suitable for video editing, I have only ever used firewire, so with usb, would I still get rewind/fastforward controls via a USB conneciton when editing? OR is the USB connection a bit like mass storage mode, where you then drag the file to the desktop/pc and then edit it in ones program of choice? Any advise will be highly appreciated. Thanks.
I don't really have any experience with the cameras that use internal hard drives, but I do know that many companies in the industry are moving to file-based formats, eliminating the need for tapes. A lot of the new cameras will record to compact flash, or some other type of removable flash storage. This has the benefit of easy access to video, and you don't have to worry about a hard drive crash bringing your entire camera down. Personally, I would go with removable media rather than hard drives in the camera. As to your second question, are you looking to edit right off the camera? If so, I would again point to the benefits of removable media. I wouldn't bother with editing off the camera. Just copy your video files to a dedicated hard drive and edit from there. I've edited from hard drives connected via USB and Firewire, and I honestly didn't notice any difference.
