flash or hard drive camcorder....

Hey guys, i got it narrowed down to two HD cameras, the canon vixia HF11 (Flash memory) and the vixia HG21 (Hard drive/expandable flash). I'm planning on shooting a nice wakeboard video featuring some norcal riders this summer with an epic underwater housing and was wondering the draw backs of subjecting a Hard drive based camera to moisture.

Are there any drawbacks to shooting on Flash based memory versus a hard drive? is the flash video more compressed? The 120gb of hard drive space that will give me 11 hours of shooting at 24mbps is looking rather appealing versus the 3 hour shooting time of 32mb of flash at 24mbps. especially when im going to be at the lake and don't want to have to take my laptop with me to dump some footage.

The other drawback to the HF11 flash camera is that it doesn't have a viewfinder, which i know is no use in the housing but could be kind of important when shooting in sunny conditions on shore or via chase boat. Other than that they have the same camera specs

Any thoughts or other camera suggestions?

The HG21 is $770 and the HF11 is $850

I'd stick with the model with the VF.

Get an ND6 filter, a hoodman for the LCD and plan on using manual focus only when you're shooting in the housing. A wide angle attachment might be good to have if you're shooting from the tube as well.

You may have problems with your editing software on capture. Many editing softwares (including Final Cut) don't capture from those cameras. You will probably have a two step process getting the footage into quicktime (or some other portable file) then take to the editing software. I teach video at a high school and have had nothing but problems with the flash cameras. They take nice video but dealing with the files is a pain.. good luck. You may want to consider tape if you are really serious about video. It will be a couple more years before hard drive cameras that work well are consumer priced....

i have the adobe video suite cs4 so it will work fine with AVCHD from what i hear.

Thanks for the input guys. I think i'm going to go with the Hard Drive model since it has the view finder. Not buying for a few weeks though so still i'm still open to suggestions.

I read a decent thread on engadget where people were really praising the flash based.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/25/ask-engadget-best-consumer-level-hdd-camcorder/

(Message edited by evil0ne on January 06, 2009)

Yeah, flash drive is probably the way to go. My camera broke, luckly after I finished filming gauntlet, but still, and the only way to pull footage off of it is by plugging it in, which happens to be the part that's broken, the charger input sloty thingymabober. Which means camera can take video, but video can't leave camera, and because of it, I'm wishing i had a flash drive camera right now...

Scott, you are mistaken. I have a the flash based vixia and it captures perfectly to my final cut suite 2 as well as final cut express. the only problem i had was figuring out the order of the process. I find if i have my camera off but plugged up and go all the way into log and transfer, then turn the camera on to connect, the camera and all the clips are recognized and no problem. It is an awesome workflow once you learn it. I take all the clips after transfer and throw the sequence file all in a folder and store it out of the way. That way all my stuff stays together. I don't miss the days of tape not one bit!

Is FCP2 still transcoding AVCHD to prores422 during ingest?

It was last time I checked.

That's going to be a tough codec for them to develop native editing for as it's really best as an acquisition only based format.