DVCam tapes

[Riley Florence]

ok, i was at the sundance film festival and a guy there was promoting DVCam, he said that i could us DVCam tapes in my XL1s, can i? and is it worth the extra money?

[Chris Hurd]

You can use the small Mini-DVCAM cassettes in your XL1S or any other camcorder in lieu of Mini-DV cassettes. You'll still be recording DV, so there's no gain in image quality or any other difference for that matter. DVCAM tapes might be a bit more robust than DV tapes and therefore less prone to drop-outs or glitches, but whether that's worth the extra cost is really your own determination to make. Multiply the run time printed on a DVCAM tape by 1.5 to get the equivalent runtime for using in a DV camcorder; in other words, a 40 minute DVCAM cassette will yield 60 minutes in a DV camcorder. Hope this helps,

[Riley Florence]

it helps a lot. he was claiming the actual picture and sound quality would be better, guess he just wanted to take a 17 year old's money. i dont have enough glitches to worry about it.

[Josh Bass]

I was told that too. Do you all know if Soderbergh (sp?) used them on full frontal?

[Ken Tanaka]

A thread that may be of interest to this topic.

Bottom line: you can use them if you want to pay a premium price (to Sony), but you're not really going to get much out of it, if anything.

Myself, I'd rather spend the extra money on other things.

[Dean Sensui]

Riley...

As long as the tape runs smoothly and won't clog your heads, it should be fine.

The signal is digital, so it's not going to have an effect one way or another regarding sound or image quality. The quality is entirely up to your mic, lens and camera's ability to encode what it captures to the digital domain.

I'm using Fuji tapes exclusively and run them through just once. I avoid playback through the camera as much as possible. So far so good. Only one or two dropouts in more than a hundred tapes.

As for DVCam tape stock being different from anything else, it might be best to ask the manufacturer. There was a long-standing debate about the Fuji Hi8 60 and 120-minute tapes. An inquiry to the manufacturer settled the issue: both were the same thickness. They just wound more tape on the 120's, which was the maximum capacity of the shell's design.

DVCam has a faster tape speed and a wider recorded track. It makes the format more robust because it's more tolerant of tracking errors. It's also less likely to be affected by small defects in the tape than MiniDV at SP speeds. Conversely, MiniDV at LP speeds have very narrow tracks and are easily affected by minor tracking errors and tape defects.

BTW, I remember people trying to BS me when I was 17 -- I found it insulting!

Dean Sensui
Base Two Productions

[Riley Florence]

it does get annoying, oh well, its good to have people like you guys here to keep me on the right track!

[Brian Pink]

from what i've heard, there's 2 issues, first, as Dean pointed out, that the format is less susceptible to dropouts etc. second, the manufacturing specs are higher since its targetted at "pros". kind of like how there's more metal on a PD150 than a VX2000. "pro". :D anyway, i stick to the sony minidv tapes and i haven't had any problems yet ( knock on desk ).

- brian

[Jeff Donald]

One of the reasons it's less susceptible to dropouts is the wider video track of DVCam. A spec of dust blocks a smaller percentage of the data. Mini Dv has a narrower track, thus negating the dropout benefit.

Jeff