This is a report on my experiment to capture video from a DVD Camera
(Bernie's).

You will recall from the last meeting that I had Bernie finalize the
disk that he was using at the time.
We then connected his camera to my Mac Powerbook using his USB
cable. To my surprise the camcorder showed up as a DVD drive on the
computer's desk top. I was able to download the VIDEO_TS folder from
the disk to my hard drive. This folder is found on all disks that
are formated for play on a standard DVD player and contains video and
audio files that are not accessible to editors or players like
Quicktime and Microsoft Media Player.

At home I opened the VIDEO_TS folder in a demo version of the
application Cinematize and was able to extract a short segment of
Bernie's video to a Quicktime file that could be imported into an
editor such as iMovie. If I had the full version of the program I
could have extracted the whole movie or any part of it.

I believe that I could have avoided the step of downloading the
VIDEO_TS folder, that is I probably could have extracted the video
directly from the disk using Cinematize.

My conclusion is that DVD cameras are now a viable alternative to
tape cameras as long as you don't mind going through an extra step.
The key to all this was the ability to mount the camera as a DVD
drive using USB. I was sure that if I had a computer with a tray
loader I could have done the same thing without the camera. But many
computers especially laptops now come with slot loaders which cannot
handle the small disks that go in the cameras.

As for the media (disks vs. tape) I am not sure yet which I would
prefer. It is my impression that the selection of cameras that shoot
to DVD is still limited and aimed at the consumer market. If you
want a more advanced camera or one with certain features then you are
more likely to find it in Mini-DV tape, but that may change. I
haven't compared the price of disks to tape. I think you can get
more minutes on a tape than a DVD. Also tape is erasable but that is
a non issue with me because I never erase my original tapes. I am
guessing that DVDs will last longer than tape and it seems to me that
the disks are more compact than tape so you could carry more with
you. The lack of moving parts means that they should be more trouble
free but then disks can be defective and you never know until you try
to play them. I also would not be surprised if Apple incorporates a
DVD extraction feature into its editors such as iMovie in the
future. Supposedly Apple and Sony have an alliance going so I am
sorta surprised that this hasn't happened already.

I am curious about the power requirements of disk vs. tape. Given
equivalent batteries and power-using features such as viewscreens and
zoom motors, which camera lets you shoot the most video on a single
charge? I know with my Digital-8 camera and a medium sized battery I
have never run out of juice on a single 1 hour tape and that includes
a lot of zooming and just leaving the camera on to check the viewfinder.

Anyway, thanks to Bernie for letting me test his camera out with my
computer. I was able to satisfy my own curiosity and also inform the
members of the Davis Mac users group who have been having a
discussion about this very issue.

Erick