MPEG-2 Camera Recording?

[blazelet]

Hey all! I have a situation that needs some contemplation ...

I am working with a Secret Shopper company to help them devise a more high tech and efficient approach to their business. Businesses hire them to wear hidden cameras into stores or the workplace and record the employees. The purpose is to evaluate their customer service.

The current method used is small cameras are worn in hidden places such as buttons or pagers. These cameras are connected to a larger camera (A Mini-DV JVC) hidden in a purse or fanny pack, which records the video signal onto a DV tape. Audio is recorded seperately onto an MP3 recorder.

Once finished the capturing process takes a couple hours to capture all the raw footage from the DV tape to the PC. The video is then edited to protect the identity of the shopper. Then it's encoded back out to MPEG-2 and burned to DVD.

My questions is :

I am wanting a hard drive camera that can capture the incoming video signal directly into a MPEG-2 formatted file. I am assuming this will cut down drastically on both the capture and transcoding time. However I am not seeing a lot of cameras that capture MPEG-2 ... the JVC GZ MC200 is the only I have found so far. Why do they all capture MPEG-4 instead? I know the file sizes on MPEG-4 are smaller, but the quality is also reduced, correct? is there just not a market for MPEG-2 recorders?

Can any of you suggest a better possible system or workflow? Is MPEG-4 quick to transcode into MPEG-2?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

Ryan

[src2206]

If I remember correctly there is one from SONY which records directly on the DVD.

[blazelet]

I dont think we want to record directly to DVD because we want to be able to edit before the final DVD is produced. That's why a hard drive camera that can do MPEG-2 would be nice ... it would cut 8 hours out of each project when you consider the capture and then transcoding time it would save.

Thanks!

[st-clares]

I assume your present method is to download from the mini camera via firewire.
The JVC MG Everio range of cameras record in Mpeg2 format but they use a mini USB connection.
They do give good video and audio, but I am not sure how they could be used for secret videoing.

[olyteddy]

Something like this?

[blazelet]

First off thank you all SO MUCH for your input. It has been insightful and given some answers!

st-clares - Yes we are currently capturing the footage in a DV avi format via firewire. I looked up the Everio, that seems to be the first camera I have been shown that can record straight to MPEG-2 with a fairly decent size storage capacity (30 GB). Overall that's a sharp camera! But the cost might be somewhat steep @ $1k. I'll see if I can't find more cameras along that vein, are you aware of any others?

olyteddy - That camera would be perfect if it were to record into MPEG-2 ... this brings us to another question, how hard is the conversion to MPEG-2 from MPEG-4?

Am I correct in my understanding that MPEG-4 was originally designed to be a more compressed format? That would make it suitable for things such as internet, but perhaps not DVD?

[olyteddy]

There are a lot of DVD players these days (many in the $50 price range) that can play MPEG4 directly (in an AVI container). Converting to standard DVD is as easy as opening the MPEG4 in an authoring program like uLead DVD Studio. You could probably Google MPEG2 recorder and find one that does MPEG2.

[blazelet]

That makes sense, I know Premiere could easily encode MPEG-4 into MPEG-2. I am to assume then that converting from 4 to 2 would not be expensive time-wise? Right now it's taking 4 hours to transcode an hour of DV Avi into MPEG-2.

[paglamon]

@blazelet,
MPEG4 is a highly compressed format.Once you do some editing on it and convert to MPEG2,the loss of quality is quite significant.DV-AVI is much better format to capture in if you need to do some editing and yet wish to have good quality end product.Ofcourse you have to pay the price of quality with time.