What format do camcorders record?

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puje
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What format do camcorders record?

Post by puje »

I was just wondering what format a real camcorder records the movie as? The only films I have made was shot with a Sony Cybershot digital camera, which also can record MPEG. And since I have never even been close to a camcorder, I would really like to know which format does a "real" camera record?
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Trochaic
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RE: What format do camcorders record?

Post by Trochaic »

They usually record in uncompressed .avi files.
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RE: What format do camcorders record?

Post by Matt »

They record in miniDV format. When the data is transferred to a PC this DV data is usually written to disk into a suitable file 'container'. This is usually avi on a PC (or mov on a Mac I think).

Avi isn't a format as such. It is a container for whatever format you want to stick inside it. Avi is a bit like a filing cabinet. You can file pages inside it but to read the pages you need the correct info to decode the data (this is what codecs are for). This is why an avi file could actually be a number of formats DV, DivX, MJPEG, XVID etc.
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