Kevin Hunt Video

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately from people in the market for a new video camera. (Yes, apparently there are some purchases even a recession can’t prevent).

I always stress that I’m nowhere near the status of being an expert. I don’t moonlight at National Camera or Best Buy. I just use video cameras on a daily basis at my day job and for my business. Several of them. From a two-year-old $200 Canon ZR200, to a brand new $3,400 Canon XH-A1 in all its HD glory – with a couple of Canon GL2’s and a Canon XL2 mixed in-between.

Aside from me liking Canon… my biggest recommendation concerns the question I posed in the title of this post. Call me crazy, but I still swear by miniDV.

Look. If a brand new XH-A1 is shooting HD video to tape, capturing great video, then that’s where my loyalty is gonna be. At least until they stop making miniDV tapes for the kinds of cameras I need to use, I suppose.

The truth is, I don’t know if I’ll want to be shooting on miniDV in three years, or five. Yes, I’ve had a couple tapes get jammed up inside a camera. It’s not fun. And not cheap to fix.

Will miniDV be replaced by nothing but hard drive cameras, sooner versus later?

I think you’ve also got to define your purpose for the camera. Are you a professional? Do you shoot family events, sports… or interviews? Do you need a camera with inputs for high-quality microphones and lighting. Will you edit the footage?

And, how will you be viewing your video? Do you only want to watch it on your computer? Or, do you also want to burn your footage onto DVDs – or BluRay (a topic for another post) – from time to time? And, what software will you use to import, edit and export your footage?

Someone like me has to be able to have a camera that captures video in the highest possible quality for viewing on a large screen plasma TV -and- for compression to upload a Web-friendly version to YouTube.

If you had to, you could shoot a video for a corporate Web site or YouTube on a cell phone. But your cell phone isn’t designed to capture video at DVD quality, or to capture more than a few seconds. You simply can’t use your cell phone, or one of those Flip MinoHD cameras – to shoot your daughter’s basketball game as you would with a larger handheld camera. At least, not effectively.

I’ll say this… I’ve imported video from a camera that records to a hard drive, instead of miniDV, into iMovie and I was disappointed with the time it took to process the footage and to export it out to DVD.

Those hard drive cameras are expensive. And you need to make sure your computer can handle the task of importing and storing the footage since you don’t have the tapes around as a backup.

I shoot to miniDV because it’s easy to import to iMovie and Final Cut. From there, I know that the export options, either to DVD or the Web, are equally easy.

Just my opinion. I like shooting to miniDV. It works for my workflow. It may not work for yours.

One word of caution though, stick with the same brand of miniDV tape in your camera. Don’t mix and match. That’s when problems can pop up inside. I’ve had that happen to me, and also have read about it happening to others.