Types of camera

In recent years cameras that record to hard drives or flash memory cards have been extremely popular. Their advantages are clear: they can be smaller, lighter and you don't have to keep on forking out for new tapes/dvds everytime you want to shoot something, and most importantly, they shoot in full HD of 1920x1080.

The primary disadvantage, however, is that storage of footage is a problem. 20 minutes of shooting with the high definition AVCHD format takes up about 20gb of hard drive when uncompressed into your editing system. If you're planning to shoot a documentary, where you may shoot 100+ hours for a 1 hour documentary, you would need 6 terabytes of hard drive to store the footage. And what do you do with the original footage once you finish editing the documentary? If you get rid of it you will never be able to use it again. If you decide to store it you will need a new 6tb every time you shoot a documentary.

Compare this to HDV, the tape-based high definition format: one hour takes up about 20gb, which means you only need 2tb to have your 100 hours of footage on your computer. And then, when you finish filming you can wipe everything off your hard drive because you still have all your footage on tape, which can be easily stored and doesn't take up much space. And tapes are only about £1 per if you find some special offers. On the negative side, HDV is 1440x1080 with rectangular pixels and tape camcorders are more expensive and don't get updated as often. Furthermore, Panasonic, which in my opinion captures the best colour out of the major camera manufacturers, does not do HDV.

So what should Muslim filmmakers do? It very much depends on their needs. For someone filming documentaries, with such a high volume of footage, a tape-based camcorder is probably best. For someone making films, where you know beforehand what you plan to shoot and what you need, a memory-based camcorder may be have considerable advantages.