i am looking for a digital camcorder for a colleague at my business which will allow us to download the footage onto a pc faster than real time. i.e. we have an analogue camera which we can copy onto vhs video, but only in real time.

we would like to eventually store the footage on a server, or collection of cd's/dvd's

ideally, the camera will write to cd/dvd, but we would like to record upto 2 hours of footage at a time. we dont mind transferring onto pc then onto disk, as long as we can do the transfer at faster than real time.

i think that will do for a shopping list for now, would like to buy on monday, so prompt replies please!

ashley

[melliott1963]

I'm not aware of any consumer camcorders that play faster than real time. If there are, then when you are capturing the video onto PC, there will be a greater risk of dropped frames (a lot of people suffer with dropped frames with the footage being captured in 'real time'!).

You can buy camcorders that will directly write to dvd, but this is instead of tape and they will only record in 'real time' (obviously).

I'm assuming you'll need to do a certain amount of editing before saving your final footage, so you really need to save to a PC and then onto disk. Unless the camcorder records in mpeg format and you edit the video in mpeg (which I suspect is highly unlikely), the PC will need to do a conversion from avi into mpeg. Even with high powered PCs, for 2 hours of footage, this will take a long time (considerabley longer than 'real time'). Also, whilst you can, I think, get 2 hours onto a standard dvd, this will need extra compression and so a reduction in visual quality. Normally, at best quality, you can only get 1 hour onto a 4.7Gb dvd.

As a footnote to this, I would just add that I am not an expert in these matters and so am prepared be corrected where necessary, but what I've written is as I understand things.

thanxs for your reply.

we were only interested in the ability to transfer from the camera to some other form of media in faster than real time.

we are probably not interested in any editing, as we are using the camera in the main as a recording tool for lean manufacturing monitoring (sort of time and motion) quality is not of our major concern - we aint shooting corporate videos here!

we like the idea of recording onto cd/dvd as this enables us to share the media with colleagues, and presenting in our conference room, without the use of vcr's.

i am essentially looking for 2 recommendations -

1 for a camera which records to tape, but has a faster than realtime download into any other format (pc or vhs (doubtful))

1 for a camera which records onto cd/dvd with the most amount of footage recordable onto a disc (quality not a major issue - time deffo is!)

thankx again for quick response.

ash