How do HD camcorders work?

Ok, using my understanding in digital photography, the higher resolution the greater the size. Sony has two HD camcorders which record in full 1080p; one being flash memory based and another is equipped with a 60GB harddrive. How practical is it to have the flash based camcorder when you can't record anything long enough to be worth while? Do they use compression technology? On top of that, if they record in RAW, uncompressed format you wouldn't be recording much. On my digital camera, I can record about 10 minutes on 2GB SD card with postage stamp size resolution, how can you fit a typical family outing in HD?

You buy larger flash memory. You can get 32 and 64GB flash already and will be able to get larger ones in the future.

I don't know about you but I don't like the idea of HD home movies. It really shows the ugly side of my face . If I have a movie star look of wife/girlfriend, I then say otherwise

They compress.

There is no equivelant to camera RAW mode on any video camera that I have heard of. That would mean no editing in any way between the sensor and the recordable media.

Originally Posted by Menace

I don't know about you but I don't like the idea of HD home movies. It really shows the ugly side of my face . If I have a movie star look of wife/girlfriend, I then say otherwise

i love my HV20...when im doing the filming and not being filmed

since my HV20 is on tape...no compression (i think)....but also a problem if you dump onto the computer...takes lots of gigs

Originally Posted by thelefteyeguy

i love my HV20...when im doing the filming and not being filmed

since my HV20 is on tape...no compression (i think)....but also a problem if you dump onto the computer...takes lots of gigs

A bit info about the HV20 ....

The Canon HV20 uses HDV compression, a very efficient MPEG-2 codec with a fixed data rate of 25Mbps, identical to the data rate of standard definition DV compression. HDV excels in capturing stunningly high-resolution video, but it is inferior to DV in terms of rendering motion realistically, due to its dependence on interframe compression. This means that at 1080i, only one in fifteen frames is a full-frame picture, while the intervening frames are compressed in relation to each full I frame. Interframe compression is much more efficient than intraframe compression, and allows HDV to squeeze a full 1920 x 1080 picture into a 25Mbps stream, recordable to inexpensive MiniDV tapes. DV uses intraframe compression, so each frame is a fully independent picture, allowing much better motion capture. DV also uses a superior 4:1:1 color space while HDV encodes via a truncated 4:2:0 color space.

Source : http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content...iew/Format.htm

These camcorders record in MPEG4 (AVCHD)

In top quality 1080P mode, you can record 32 minutes onto one 4GB card.

For the HD based camcorder, you can record 8 hours at full 1080P onto the hard disk (60GB) which should be enough for even a very long vacation.

What do you guys use to edit and play back your HD movies? Can you play from anything other than the camcorder itself - eg. a DVD player?