Recording the holidays for posterity
Just about everyone has a camera phone these days but they’re not really up to recording your memories of a holiday as they basically don’t have enough memory nor have they the flexibility to do that.
For that you need to start trawling through the camcorder reviews where you’ll come across a whole new world of acronyms and technologies. However, it’s not nearly so complicated as it first appears.
To begin with you need to think about whether you want to use a card, DVD or tape based camcorder. The DVD ones get quite bad press sometimes basically because not all DVD players can cope with the small DVDs that these camcorders use and there’s the issue about how long they could be expected to last. The tape based ones have been around a long time and use the miniDV standard which will hold about an hour of video. They’re larger than the card based devices and you’ll need to use cables to copy the movies on to your computer.
The other consideration is whether to use standard or HD video. In practical terms there’s not much of a difference in cost these days and HD will almost always be your best choice. This will use up more cards but doesn’t require any space on the tape as compression is used with the miniDV standard.
Finally, there’s the issue of what to do with the used media. With miniDV you may as well keep the original tapes as they’re very cheap but the cards can become quite expensive. If the only copy you’re keeping it that on your computer, don’t forget to keep backup copies as otherwise you’re sure to lose your movies at some point in the future.
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