I’m going to try and prevent this from turning into a rant, but I want to point out a dangerous trend to which nobody is paying much attention.  I was reading about recent additions to Canon’s line of Vixia camcorders, and noticed that there seems to be a feature war between the various video camera manufactures (such as Sony, Panasonic, and, of course, Canon) to stuff as much memory, via hard drive or flash, into these cameras.

Now I can understand that to the average marketing executive and consumer, increasing the camera’s memory and thus the amount of video it can record would be a great selling point.  Who wouldn’t want to be able to record more than 29 hours of video on their camera’s 240GB internal hard drive?  Compared to the average miniDV tape’s 60 minutes of recordability, this is an almost 30X improvement!  And in case you aren’t ready to hand over your credit card just yet, most of these camcorders record video in various levels of high definition at data rates over 20Mbps!

While the 240GB example is (given current product versions) an extreme case, even the more modest 32GB flash memory based models record more than 12 hours of standard definition video…again, a 12X increase over my miniDV camcorder’s 1 hour standard definition tapes.

The problem with recording such vast amounts of data arises in how the average person manages those bits and bytes, which in my experience with owners of these “tapeless” products can be explained quite simply.  They don’t manage their data.  Hours and hours of precious family memories get precariously recorded and stored on the internal hard drives or flash memory (both of which tend to fail) of these camcorders.  Often times, the camcorder becomes the “VCR” of family movies.  How does someone easily offload and archive 32GB of high definition family videos in a safe, easily accessible and transferable way?  People’s inability to make regular backups of even the smallest documents has spawned an entire industry of automated software and online storage solutions, neither of which can come close to handling the huge amounts of data these camcorders generate.

I understand that it’s difficult to store the large amounts of data necessary for high definition video on a tape, and that typically tape based media precludes faster than real time data retrieval.  Tapes also degrade over time.  But a tape’s benefit is not in any technical aspect of its functionality, rather it is in how it compels the consumer to “change the tape”…to deal with the data at regular, manageable intervals.  If a tape fails, you loose one hour of your memories, not thirty.

So next time you’re buying a camcorder, consider how you’ll manage the 240GB of video you shoot.

PS – To some extent, this argument transfers to digital cameras with memory cards capable of holding thousands of pictures.