John August's New Camcorder

Bloghappy screenwriter John August shares the reasoning behind his decision to buy a Samsung SCX105L MPEG4 Sports Camcorder even though he already has a Sony DV camera.

I suspect he will be annoyed with the difficulties of Mpeg4 as an archive format. Unless he is dutiful at burning his files to CD (or DVD), they are going to start to take up a lot of space. And copying the files from memory sticks to a hard drive already takes plenty of time.

Although it seems backwards, like I tell my iTunes-loving friends, try to get your data in the purest format you can, which in the case of consumer music is the CD. The .mp3, .aac and other sound formats sold by online stores are lower quality and have DRM attached, limiting what you can do with them. You're better off having your own CD collection that you can rip into .ogg or whatever format ends up coming along, with minimal loss in sound quality. So too with video. You're better off having a digiBeta or miniDV archive that you can capture at whatever spec you end up needing.

UPDATE: August's response, #8 in the comments on his post:

J. Ott:

I very much see your point re: the size of the video files. Much like how I use a digital camera, I anticipate saving only the clips I need, and deleting the rest. It forces a kind of vigor in archiving. One reason I never look through my old DV tapes is that it’s so hard to figure out what’s on them.

(Be sure to also read Mike from HD for Indies' comment (#15) on what John August should do.)