Will Head
Making the jump to hard disk-based video isn’t as pricey or as difficult as you’d think: simply attach a dedicated hardware unit to your camcorder.
Video has traditionally been tape-based, and even the jump to digital still employed tape to store the information. With an hour of DV footage occupying 13GB of space, it’s only recently that solid state storage has dropped in price sufficiently to make ditching tape an option.
Tape has served us well: it’s a proven format and extremely cheap for the amount of storage it provides. Its biggest downside, however, is the need to capture in real-time. Shoot an hour of video and you’ll have to wait an hour for it to copy onto your Mac. A file-based system, on the other hand, lets you start using the footage as quickly as your connection will allow – it’s a simple file copy from the storage device to your hard drive.
Tapeless systems, such as Panasonic’s P2 storage cards, have existed for some time but they’re pretty expensive. A 16GB card, which will store an hour of SD footage – less if you want HD – will set you back around £300, and you’ll need a few if you don’t want to be constantly copying files to the computer to clear up space.
Sony’s new HXR-NX5E camcorder uses standard SDHC or Memory Stick Duo cards to record footage, making it more cost-effective – a 16GB SDHC card costs around £30 and has space for over an hour of HD material.
If you don’t want to splash out on new equipment and you’ve got a DV or HDV camera that you’re quite happy with, you can still convert it into a tapeless device without spending too much money. There are two options available: you can either use software to capture the footage as you shoot it directly to your Mac’s hard drive or you can use a hardware device that records the video stream to either an internal drive or memory card, and then copy it over when you’ve finished shooting.
Which option to go for depends on a couple of factors. Recording straight to your Mac’s hard drive is the simplest setup and there’s no transfer time – as soon as you stop recording, you can start editing. If you use Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 for editing, then you’ve already got everything you need. Simply hook your camera up to your Mac via FireWire and the bundled OnLocation application will handle the rest. It can capture both DV and HDV, and it will synchronise with your camcorder, so it will start capturing when you hit the record button and stop when the camera stops. The downside of this setup is the lack of portability – you’ll always need a Mac hanging off the FireWire connection of your camcorder – plus the extra cost (around £800) if you don’t already have Premiere.
For greater portability, a dedicated hardware unit that attaches to your camera is the way to go. Focus Enhancements’ FS range of DTE (Direct To Edit) recorders connect to your camcorder via a single FireWire cable and record what you’re shooting to either hard disk or memory card, depending on the model.
Sony also has two hardware recording devices, and although you’ll need a compatible Sony camcorder to use some of the advanced features, they will work with other DV and HDV cameras as well.
The HVR-DR60 comes with a 60GB hard drive built in, which is enough room for around four-and-a-half hours of recording, while the HVR-MRC1K uses Compact Flash (CF) cards instead – a 16GB card can store over an hour of footage.
The advantage of a hard disk is that it offers greater capacity, though once it’s full, you’ll need to connect it to a computer and copy off the footage before you can continue. It’s also more susceptible to shock damage if you drop it. A device that uses memory cards is more resilient to bumps and bashes, as there are no moving parts, and you can continue recording for as long as you have blank cards available. The HVR-DR60 will set you back around £1000, while the HVR-MRC1K costs less at £750, but you’ll need to budget for CF cards as well. The cards need to be at least 133x speed – a suitable 16GB card costs around £35.
We’ve been using the HVR-MRC1K since September last year and haven’t had to capture a single file since – it’s an immense time saver and drastically speeds up how quickly you can turn edits around. As it’s an add-on for an existing tape based camera, there’s the added advantage that it records to both tape and CF card at the same time. This means if anything happens to the card, you’ve still got the tape to fall back on. It also simplifies logging, as you only need to note down the file number for each shot.
If you’ve got one of Sony’s newer HVR-Z7E or HVR-Z5E camcorders, it clips on the back over the battery cover and draws its power from the unit so it hardly adds any bulk to the camera. These models have also been designed with the CF writer in mind, so offer advanced features like allowing you to shoot only to CF card and not to tape. Older camcorders won’t let you press record if you haven’t got a tape loaded.
However, it will work with older models like the HVR-A1E and HVR-Z1E as well – or indeed any DV or HDV camcorder. It’s not quite as elegant, since you’ll need to mount the unit in the camcorder shoe, but there is an adaptor supplied. It then plugs into the FireWire port on your camcorder and starts capturing footage when you hit the record button. Unlike the newer models, which can communicate directly with the CF writer to tell it when to start recording, in this mode it just monitors the FireWire port and starts when it detects a signal. This means that you need to wait around a second or two after pressing record to ensure that the CF unit has started capturing all the action.
Once you’ve finished shooting, getting your footage onto your Mac is fairly simple. If you’re using Premiere, you can simply copy all the files over using Finder and then import them straight in – Premiere is happy to work with the M2T format that the unit natively records to if you’re working in HDV.
Final Cut is a little less straightforward, as you can’t import M2T files directly. Sony has produced a plug-in, however, which allows you to use the Log and Transfer feature to pull content from the CF card into Final Cut. The process is a little bit slower than a direct copy, as it saves the footage as QuickTime HDV files but it’s still far faster than capturing from tape.
Once you’ve used a tapeless system, it’s hard to go back to capturing manually again. With newer cameras, it’s much more seamless, but even retro-fitting an existing camcorder with a CF card writer isn’t too much hassle, and it will save time when it comes to getting your footage onto your Mac. It will cost around £1000, but it’s still cheaper than spending up to £5000 on a camera, and the time saved not having to capture video – not to mention the ability to turn work around faster – will soon pay for itself.
