Rebel Filmmaker

Archive for May, 2009

On July 22nd 2008, Canon Inc. announced two new consumer HD camcorders for the Japanese market. One of these — the VIXIA HG21 — was an expected move. It’s a timely update of Canon’s HG10, originally released about a year ago. However, the other new camcorder, the VIXIA HF11, comes as a bit of a surprise to some people. After all, its predecessor, the VIXIA HF10, has been on the market for only a few short months. An examination of the history of Canon’s camcorder lineage reveals that their product revs for consumer HD camcorders happen at a much lower frequency… usually about every 18 months or so. Their standard definition DV price leaders, known as the ZR Series camcorders, are renewed like clockwork at the same time of year, every year: when CES, the Consumer Electronics Show rolls around each January, the Canon ZR camcorder line is changed up slightly. It’s a predictable yearly occurrence that’s so regular you could mark the press release date on a calendar months in advance.

So it’s a kind of rare, and maybe a little odd, when a top-of-the-line, premium electronics product such as Canon’s HF10 suddenly gets updated only three months out of the gate. The HF10 began shipping late in April, and news of the HF11 now arrives barely 90 days later. When the HF11 becomes available in September, only five months will have passed between the two. What’s going on? The answer is pretty simple… the HF11 is an *addition* to the VIXIA HD product line. It doesn’t actually replace the HF10. It balances out Canon’s flash memory camcorder family:

Like the HF10, the HF11 is a dual-memory camcorder. It can record High Definition video, as well as still photos, to your choice of two types of recording media in the camera. One choice is a removeable memory card, and the other choice is internal flash memory permanently built into the camcorder (16 gigabytes in the HF10 and 32 gigabytes in the HF11). The internal flash memory enables you to start shooting right out of the box; you won’t need to insert a memory card. The internal flash memory is ample enough to give you a couple of hours of recording time at the best video quality settings, and even more recording time if you’re willing to trade away a little image quality to get it. Utilize both recording options by adding an SDHC memory card, and you won’t have to trade away anything. When the internal flash memory fills up, you can bypass it and go on recording to a removeable flash memory card.

So, why bother with dual-memory at all? Isn’t the card-only camcorder just as good? The VIXIA HF100 is indeed the same camcorder, without the internal flash memory — it has only an SDHC card slot. It costs less than the HF10 or HF11, and the difference in price can buy several high-capacity SDHC cards, providing plenty of recording time. So where is the advantage in the dual-memory concept? It’s in the ability to share images. If your family and friends have digital still cameras that use SD or SDHC memory cards, you can copy photos back and forth between the internal flash memory and the removeable card, while HD video clips can be copied from a card to the internal memory. This is handy if you happen to be naturally gregarious; it’s a great way to immediately swap images between friends, instead of having to remember to do it by email later on. And while it’s easy enough just to carry a few extra cards, some folks prefer not to have to keep track of where those cards are or what’s on them or which ones are already filled. With a dual-memory camcorder, just one SDHC card plus the internal flash can be more than enough recording time (see table below). At least there’s a choice here; either a dual-memory camcorder for those who feel they need it, or a card-only camcorder for those who are happy just to change out cards.

Except for the HF100, the times presented in the table above are the sum total recording times of both recording media added together. When available time runs out on one memory format, it does not automatically begin recording to the other. There’s a Memory Manager menu in the camcorder to control how the memory types are used.

There’s a broader range of available SDHC cards now compared to earlier this year when the HF100 and HF10 were first announced, and card prices have dropped dramatically. Regular SD cards aren’t fast enough to write High Definition video in these camcorders; the card type must be SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity). Be sure to choose a Class 4 or Class 6 card. Class 6 cards are faster, but Class 4 is sufficient for HD recording at all quality / data rates. The video format recorded by these camcorders is AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec, High Definition), and we’ll get into its details here shortly.

Up to this point I haven’t really mentioned anything in particular about the new HF11. It’s pretty much identical to the HF10, with two important exceptions. First, the amount of internal flash memory is 32 gigabytes (compared to 16 gigabytes built into the HF10). Second, and much more interesting, is that unlike the HF10 and HF100 that came before it, the HF11 has the capability of shooting video at the maximum data rate called for in the AVCHD format specification, which is 24 megabits per second (the HF10 and HF100 max out at 17 megabits per second). The big question is: how does AVCHD video shot at 24mbps compare to AVCHD video shot at 17mbps, and to HDV at 25mbps. We’ll examine that now, since we just spent the last couple of days test-driving the new HF11 in and around Austin, Texas.