Tapeless Acquisition

I attended a post-production conference in New York this past October and one of the most exciting ideas presented related to the field of digital video production was that of tapeless acquisition. While the miniDV format has made possible the production of TV-quality video by even the most amateur user, the format isn't without its fair share of flaws. Drop frames are a huge problem that plague even the most experienced editors at one point or another, and sometimes the 60-minute tape length just isn't long enough for certain users. However, one of the biggest pains of working with miniDV is the amount of time required for capturing footage prior to editing. If you shot 30 minutes worth of footage and plan to import all of it into Final Cut, plan to sit there and watch your computer screen for a solid thirty minutes (not including the initial logging time) before ever getting a chance to start cutting the material. While DV is great on so many fronts, stories (from a journalistic perspective) only maintain their relevancy for so long, and thus the most efficient work flow requires the shortest possible time between when the footage was shot and the package is edited. With tapeless acquisition, such latency and downtime is eliminated altogether. You shoot straight to hard disk versus digital tape, and with a solid FireWire connection, your footage is on your computer and ready for editing in no time. This article from 2004 gives a fairly solid overview of the pluses and minuses of both the miniDV and tapeless work flows, and while it is somewhat dated, most of the facts remain accurate, with the exception of the price points listed for some of the hard disk drives (they're still somewhat pricey, but not nearly as bad as they used to be-and the long-term benefits far outweigh the initial investment, hands down).