Transferring from PC to HV20

[Wibble]

I've just ordered my HV20 and have got a question that I hoped you might be able to answer. Keep in mind, though, that I've never used let alone owned a camcorder or edited footage from one so I may be asking a silly question or missing something fundamental!

As I understand it I'll record footage with the HV20 onto tape, then download that to my PC via firewire for editing. I've not chosen any editing software yet, so this question's not specific to any particular program.

My question is - once I've finished editing the video I'll want to back it up. I would've thought that a good place to back it up to would be back onto a tape, so transferring it from the PC to the HV20.

Is that possible?

Also, as I've never done any of this before, is it sensible? E.g. are there better ways to store the video (such as on DVDs, though I believe they have a much lower capacity than tape) or for technical reasons would there be problems (like loss in quality) if I did that?

Thanks in advance!

:)

[ib84]

hey wibble.

DVD would be too small indeed, depending on how long your scenes are. If you have only one long 60min clip per tape, then your idea indeed would be very practical, because you could see it independently of the PC and on cheap medium.

However, since you would need to reencode to 25mbits mpeg2, this would come with a significant image quality loss, unless you only cut the raw mpeg-stream without editing it.

If you do edit the footage, depending on your quality needs, you could encode to Mpeg4 at about 20mbits, you should get really very decent PQ, even much better if you tweak the settings.
Saved on duallayer-DVD you could reproduce that DVDs without a PC with a HD-Divx-capable player (they are really cheap).

Another future alternative for more clips / higher quality needs would be blue-ray DVD, but it will take some time until they get cheap

[24Peter]

My question is - once I've finished editing the video I'll want to back it up. I would've thought that a good place to back it up to would be back onto a tape, so transferring it from the PC to the HV20.

Is that possible?

:)

Most video editing software has this capability - in Sony Vegas, it's called "print to tape". Shouldn't be a big deal with any program if that's what you want to do.

[Wibble]

Thanks for the replies - very helpful!

I'll have a play around with the HV20 when it arrives and see what works best - archiving back to tape or putting it onto DVDs and getting a DivX DVD.

What do you all do with yours? Do you backup to DVD (single or dual layer?) or to tape? Or do you keep the original, unedited tapes you shot the footage on and put the editted versions on DVD?

[24Peter]

Or do you keep the original, unedited tapes you shot the footage on and put the editted versions on DVD?

That's what I do. :hv20-smilie110: