Digital Commons at Penn State

A detailed preview of the camera can be found here http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Panasonic-HDC-SD5-First-Impressions...

The HDC-SD5 Camera is a new Digital Camcorder that will capture to a standard SD card that you find in most Digital Still Cameras these days. This gives the Camera a great advantage in flexibility since these cards have been around for a long time now and there isn’t much chance of them disappearing anytime soon. More than this though it makes Solid State Capturing more accessible to the general public.

Solid state capturing will drastically reduce the time it takes to capture video footage to a computer. With a MiniDV camera if you have an hour of footage to capture than it takes an hour to capture that footage, with solid-state media the footage is treated like a computer file. This means that that same hour of footage could take thirty minutes or less to transfer over to you’re computers depending on the speed of media.

Another significant advantage to Solid State Recording is reusability. Currently one should never use a MiniDV tape more than once, doing so can cause problems with the tape and the footage. However, with SD cards all one needs to do is format the card after capturing the footage to reuse it, it would be nothing to reuse the same card thousands of times.

Capturing footage from Solid State Memory will be different than what we are used to with MiniDV. Instead of finding each shot on a linear based Tape to record we would now only need to drag and drop our footage from the SD card in our editor such as iMovie, afterwards we simply wait for the computer to transfer everything over and put the footage into our clips pane. This would again save us time not only in transferring quickly but also we will no longer need to baby sit the process.

As the technology leapfrogs the limits of tape-based media, solid state Media will eventually become the standard. The Panasonic SD5 camcorder is a great step in that direction.