The Gifted Babies

RIP Hitachi DZ-MV750E DVD camcorder 2005 – 2008

Not that it's broken, it's just that I'm no longer going to buy Mini-DVDs for it

It’s like that scene from Old Yeller. I’ve never seen the film but I heard about what happens in the end, turns out Bruce Willis’s character was the ghost of Kaiser Sosay. But that has got nothing to do with the topic, despite what Cethan may suggest in the comments section. Anyway, after shooting the last few scenes for the second Milton film on Thursday night, I pretty much used the last blank mini-DVD that I’ve been able to find from a pile of computer accessories I intend on giving away for charity with an attached price tag. I’ve had this Hitachi DZ-MV750E DVD camcorder for 3 years now but it was only since last year that I started using it for making films. I used it the year before to film a Dramat play but that turned out to be a pointless endeavour, as I had too much college work to do & Dramat never bothered chasing after me to get the stuff edited. The play was quite shite. Anyway, my dad bought it for me when he was flying back from Australia in 2005, he picked it up from Singapore Airport for something like €250 so back then it was a pretty good price and as far as I can remember DVD cameras were a lot more popular back then, nowadays people just spend their money on flavoured condoms.

So what was so good about them? Simple, anything you recorded could be played instantly on a DVD player.

And what’s so bad about this camera in particular?

1. The Mini-DVD medium imposed severe storage restrictions, for a reasonably ok quality video you could only record 30 minutes of footage. Highest quality 18. Dodgiest quality was 60.
2. In order to properly playback and extract video footage from the Mini DVD to the PC you’d have to ‘close’ the DVD, preventing any more footage from being recorded onto it.
3. Continuing the point above, it was extremely wasteful & expensive to ‘close’ the DVD when there was only  5 minutes of footage shot. Especially when Mini-DVD prices that I saw in shops range from €1 to €2.
4. Despite being advertised as such, the camera could not record to Mini-DVD-RWs.
5. Tilting the camera a little too much while recording interfered with the recording process, produced errors in the footage forcing DVD players to skip the video segment entirely.
6. There was no record video to SD feature 😦
7. Even in fine mode, the video featured some nasty compression artefacts.
8. Bleeuuuurgh, all footage recorded was interlaced
9. Low fidelity colour reproduction, probably due to nasty Chroma subsampling scheme that the camera used.
10. When working with ripped VOB files from the camera, the audio would always go out of sync making editing the footage the stuff of nightmares & how unfortunate that I recently worked out a solution to that problem 😦
11. Exposure to extreme heat & cold or sunlight, damages sensitive Mini-DVDs, you can get sturdier Mini-DVDs however they come with a heftier price tag.
12. All footage is shot at a resolution of 352×586, but stretched to 704×586 when played causing footage to look more pixelated.

List of films that were shot with this camera

1. Worksheets
2. True Love Leaves No Traces
3. Wilfred ( yet to be released )
4. Trippers Through Time
5. Bad Vibrations
6. Second Milton film

Everything else was just either some pretty random crap or random pretty crap like that video I have of a friend of mine wrestling his girlfriend to the ground and the video that showed what my aparment looked like without the carpet, furniture and most importantly my desktop. The dark age as I liked to call it, as ESB disconnected my power for at least 2 weeks when I first moved in.

So the news is I have now released myself from its shackles and sensibly made the switch to DV.