iVideo is coming
I don't have any hard evidence but if Samsung is working on one then I am sure Apple will be to.
I am in the process of selling my product idea to Samsung. I showed them the iPod - they didn't even know it existed. They were astounded. I really went into the quality of the product - the solid feel, ease of use, speed, battery life, etc.
I then introduced my idea - a small HD based DV / MPEG video camera. No clumsy tapes, etc. just click, record, download. Record in high quality DV format or just MPEG for home video / email clips, etc.
I haven't seen my iPod since - last I saw of it, it was completely dissected. The engineers are working on a feasibility study right now. After meeting with them I doubt they can make a package as refined as the iPod - they just don't have a clue.
The one engineer had an idea - let's make an all-in-one device - video, MP3, organizer, dig cam, rem control, etc. At this point I realized I have about a 10% chance of getting this product out the door.
But if Apple were to produce such - it would be done right. Sony hasn't yet produced one because they make money selling tapes - check the prices of their Micro DV tapes.
Apple is looking to make more off the same few customers it has and over time we will be seeing more computer add ons.
I am in the process of selling my product idea to Samsung. I showed them the iPod - they didn't even know it existed. They were astounded. I really went into the quality of the product - the solid feel, ease of use, speed, battery life, etc.
I then introduced my idea - a small HD based DV / MPEG video camera. No clumsy tapes, etc. just click, record, download. Record in high quality DV format or just MPEG for home video / email clips, etc.
I haven't seen my iPod since - last I saw of it, it was completely dissected. The engineers are working on a feasibility study right now. After meeting with them I doubt they can make a package as refined as the iPod - they just don't have a clue.
The one engineer had an idea - let's make an all-in-one device - video, MP3, organizer, dig cam, rem control, etc. At this point I realized I have about a 10% chance of getting this product out the door.
But if Apple were to produce such - it would be done right. Sony hasn't yet produced one because they make money selling tapes - check the prices of their Micro DV tapes.
Apple is looking to make more off the same few customers it has and over time we will be seeing more computer add ons.
Comments
To be honest, I find that incredibly hard to believe. But even if true, we'll see.
Apple will capture to DV format if they do this. Why? Because that's what iMovie uses, and it would completely destroy what they're working for if they make a video component that doesn't interface with what is perhaps their most famous consumer program.
Personally, I don't see it happening. DV format takes too much space to do on a tiny hard drive. Given the cost of the iPod, it's much more effective to just buy a little DVCam.
forgive my memory .. i am drunk ...
although i don't believe the original post at all it is keeping the flames of fantasy alive for pocket video advocates ... that alone is fun ...
Just my 3 cents shy of a nickel
However, is it really neccessary to use 1.8" drives? You could still make a very small camera using a 2.5 notebook drive. I guess power consumption becomes an issue, but you could make do with a 4200rpm unit backed by a big cache and a moulded li-poly battery.
It'd still be expensive, but you could get big storage, possibly even upgrade the drive down the line?
Actually 90 minutes is a perfectly acceptable recording time (the average domestic 60 minute DV tape has Christmas at the beginning, summer in the middle and Christmas at the end). The disc cost compared to tape cost is irrelevant as it is a temporary, not an archive medium.
Then you think about it for a bit. A DVD disc has less than 10Mbps data rate and it's picture looks wonderful. Way better than your DV-home movies. OK, so they're pros working from excellent source material, but you CAN do some great things with relatively low bit-rates.
Apple has some choice MiniDV, MPEG2, MPEG4, QT. All depends on the intended use.
The drive isn't really seeking, reading, and writing in bursts. Its activity is fairly constant, so who cares about seek time or through-put? SLOW the drive DOWN as much as possible. If all we need is about 3.6MBps we could concievably drop the rotational speed down to a constant 1000rpm or so. This might be even better than constantly spinning the drive up and then down.
[ 05-13-2002: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>
Why would Apple (or anyone) build this, or buy this? What could this device do that a current MiniDV camera cannot? I cannot think of a single advantage, and can think of MANY disadvantages.
1) Size. An iPod HD is really not that much bigger than a MiniDV mechanism. Just look at the Canon Elura2 for an idea of how small you can get a MiniDV camera.
2) Versatility. Why would you want a HD that is stuck in the camera, and not easily (if at all) replaceable? MiniDV tapes are small, convenient and reliable. (Tape vs. Optical for reliability, shock-resistance, etc.) Many people like to have multiple tapes for different types of footage (and stills/video). You would lose this. Most importantly, what happens when you have filled up your 90 minute HD and need/want to shoot more and don't have a computer at hand? You're screwed!!!
3) Price. I see no reason why a micro HD-based camera would be any cheaper than a MiniDV, and it would probably be considerably more expensive.
4) Why would Apple or anyone else write all sorts of new codecs, file formats, etc. just so that they could do this, when it would result in worse quality video footage for a more expensive camera that has no benefits over the current kit? It's not really like anyone wants to watch unedited video or on the web (which is the only benefit I could see to using some modified MPEG4 codec).
The only benefit I can see would be battery life, which might well be better than MiniDV cameras. A HD spinning likely wouldn't use any more power than spinning DV cassette spindles.
Wish You Were Here, you sure that wasn't Scamsung you visited? Sounds to me like some engineers/teenagers just got themselves a free iPod, by listening to your ideas, and pretending that they'd never seen one before. :-)
I think a more sensible approach would be to employ DV tapes, but allow the video to also be streamed through a firewire cable to the iPod in the filmmaker's pocket. This would ENHANCE the functionality of the product with Apple's simplicity without limiting it. Then you could synch the iPod to iMovie the same way you synch it to iTunes.
Another problem I have with the 20gig iVideoCamera is that where the heck are you going to store this 20gig when you want the camera drive free again? certainly not on my 20gig iBook!!!!!
Pres
Advantages...
1) Mini DV tapes are Linear. If you want to pull video from a Mini DV tape, you have to search through the tape to find the scenes you want, or download the whole tape and remove scenes you don't want. If you have a HD based recording device you can easily move the scene you want to use without having to search through an hour of tape. Apple could use and indexing / thumnailing system like in iMovie to label the scenes. Linear systems can also only upload footage in realtime, as far as I know... If it was reading from a HD, you could take footage as fast as it could be read from the HD.
2) DV tapes are 90 min, max. HDs keep getting higher and higher density. I'm not saying that a 10GB drive would be that useful for a camera, but 3 of four years down the road, when iPod sized HDs are at about 100 GB... Whoa, momma.
3) Who wants to fool around with tapes? If your internal HD was big enough to fit several hours of video, why would you rather carry around a handful of tapes? Then you have to worry about changing tapes, labelling cataloging...The only disadvantage is that when your HD is full, you can't record any more until you remove some footage.
Which brings me to my last point... Why use MPEG 4? Because it gives great quality at low bitrates. This means many more hours of footage on your HD. Lower bitrates also mean less data output, so the HD would not have to work as hard. Aha, suddenly we have more battery life.
And what about archiving, you ask? What about DVDs? They seem to work fine for video, last time I checked. Apple could even build software for storing unedited footage, without converting it to MPEG-2, on DVDs. They would not be playable on a DVD player, but you could quickly free up some HD space to shoot more footage. You could plug the camera into your mac and it would burn the data directly to the DVD, so you would not even need any free HD space on your Mac. Then you could edit it later, if you wanted to.
What's with this comment :
releasing a product that requires a Mac wouldn't make sense.
What about the iPod? Looks like it's selling pretty well, even though you need a Mac to use it.
And what about streaming footage to your iPod? You're going to sit there for an hour while your tape-based camera sends data to your iPod for what reason? So that you have a duplicate of your footage? Or so that you can reuse your tape? Not a good idea with MiniDV. Your tapes will be useless in no time. Once a tape has been recorded over 2 or 3 times, it starts dropping frames like crazy. Why not just put in another tape, and wait until you get home to upload it to your Mac for editing?
Boy, for Canadians, you guys sure are dumb.
Current MiniDV camcorders advertise still image capture, but it's just the same 720x480 frame written to tape over multiple frames. If Apple's iCamera (or whatever) behaved exactly like existing USB still cameras AND existing MiniDV camcorders and auto-synched via firewire with BOTH iMovie and iPhoto, then I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
-CFPC
If my iPod can handle the abuse, why not a camera?
As for the durability, some pros are capturing directly to hard-drives already -- George Lucas comes to mind -- but those guys have unlimited money, so that's not exactly consumer grade stuff.
Studios will use BIG hard drives and shoot for hours. But again, a big budget studio shoot can afford lots of power and equipment, even on remote locations. Not a problem if you're shooting LoTR or AOTC, but problematic for a lot of other (even pro) uses like documentary, extreme sports, live news correspondence. Still, for these uses a custom enclosure can solve most of the extreme temp concerns. Like I said previously, it all depends on your intended use.
SO,
Can an HDD video device be any good as a small handheld camcorder? I think yes. First off, we loose the 1.8 drive and go with a BIG 2.5" notebook drive modified to spin only fast enough to record the stream and not more than that. Playback and off-loading can utilize a full conventional rotational speed, but recording only needs about 1200rpm or so. You can save a lot of power right there. I still think such a device is a couple of years away (when bigger notebook drives are available and cheaper) but just for argument's sake. The device consists of a moulded Li-poly battery, the HDD, the optics, a viewfinder, and an LCD.
But I don't know if that's the implementation of an HDD. Tape is still very good, and bound to get cheaper.
Maybe the 1.8" drive is best suited to a DIGITAL STILL CAMERA with a secondary video function. Right now the only hybrids you can get either take good stills and postage size QTs or they take good video and passable 0.5 - 1.5 MP stills. However, you could get a high quality still 3.3+ MP still camera to do a bit better than the pathetic QT's they now take, which more than anything else are storage limited. Even the 5GB iPod drive could get a couple of hours of decent quality MPEG2 on it. A better codec and 10-20GB drive could make shooting decent home videoo from a digital still camera possible. The advantage would be that you could make the device pocketable.
You need a good programmable encoder/decoder, and while compressed formats can be a bitch to edit, it wouldn't be impossible to fix the problem. Software could be worked out so that it doesn't degrade the clip each time you process it. The camera would certainly be very web friendly and small. The video would merely exist as a very nice addition to the still camera abilities. Something to take with you on vacation for HQ still and decent (640x480@30fps) video.
I think the 1.8" drive could certainly work as a way of putting video on still cameras.
But it needs some time before cost and battery life will allow it.
[ 05-13-2002: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>