videobear
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Aug 5, 2004, 4:14 PM
Post #8 of 8
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Re: [Postal_Boy] Sony PD170 vs. VX2100
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Sony fans: No lashing of Postal Boy allowed!
The DVX-100A is an excellent camcorder, and should be on the short list of everyone looking in this price/quality range.
That's all I'll say on that score, since Postal covered the basic differences very well: The Sony excels in low light, and the Panny has progressive scan modes.
On mdslammer's other question, DV vs. DVCAM:
The two formats are IDENTICAL in video and audio quality. Identical. No difference.
Now the fine print.
The DVCAM format uses a 30% higher tape speed, so a one-hour DV cassette will only last for 40 minutes in DVCAM mode.
The adavantage of this higher tape speed is a lower data density on the tape. In turn, this leads to a greater resistance to digital dropouts. Sony also claims less tape stretch and greater S/N ratio for their DVCAM tape, which could result in greater durability if you do a lot of multi-pass editing, and could extend the shelf life of the recorded tape. This isn't generally a factor in the usual one-pass capture-then-edit NLE situation.
DVCAM uses something called "locked audio" in which the audio is associated with every single frame of video. The DV format doesn't do this, relying on the system clock to keep things in sync. At worst, DV's audio is never more than one field off, and usually much less than that. This is not generally a problem, but if you use a linear editing system (as opposed to the NLEs most of us have these days), it's possible to put together two DV clips where the audio doesn't quite cover the outgoing or the incoming video frame. What results is an audio "click" at the edit point. Note: the "unlocked audio" of the DV format has nothing to do with issues like audio drift, or audio that's noticeably out of sync with the video. These issues do occur, but they are due to other causes, usually mismatched settings between your camcorder and your NLE in the areas of audio sample rate or time code.
The other potential advantage of using DVCAM is the availability of rugged, flexible, professional DVCAM decks in the edit suite. If you have one of these $5,000 babies, you can kiss the problems of "his tape wouldn't play back on my camcorder" goodbye. The mini-DV format is very small, and tiny differences in tape transport alignments can make it difficult or impossible to play back a tape that was recorded on another machine. You may not run into this problem for years...or it could happen at any time. If you don't have a professional DVCAM deck sitting around, the usual workaround is to play the tape using the camera that recorded it, and capture to the hard drive or make a Firewire dub.
Regards,
Doug Graham
Panda Productions
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