SD Card Selection

Planning on filming in High Definition?  If your videocam stores video on SD Cards then choose your card wisely.  This is one place where I wouldn't try to save a few dollars.  Think about it really - if you're shooting video of your kids as they blow out the birthday candles on their cake or taking short snippets of video during your vacation, well realistically these are memories you'll want to keep forever.

And \nothing could be worse than reviewing the video you just shot just to find that artifacts are showing up on screen, the audio isn't synched to video, or any other number of things that can go wrong.

So in this area choose the best card you can!  Look at the graphic above - two PNY cards both of them 16GB in capacity.  But one of these you would not want to use for hi-def video.  Which one?  The one on the left - the Class 4 card is the one to avoid.  The price will be much lower than the Class 10 card but it is not capable of capturing the throughput of information that a Class 10 card can.

Here's a basic comparison of the different Classes:
(Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital )

Class 2 = 2MB/s
Class 4 = 4MB/s
Class 6 = 6MB/s
Class 10 = 10MB/s

Depending on the quality of your video, the amount captured will vary anywhere (using the Canon Vixia HF M301 as an example) anywhere from 5Mbps (lowest quality) to 24Mbps (highest quality).

Now buying a high capacity high speed card can cost - and buying several of them costs even more.  But from personal experience I can tell you that if you shop around for the best price then you will find there are deals to be had!

Example - a few months ago we were planning our summer vacation.  I knew that I'd be shooting lots of video and wanted to have at least three cards.  At that time the PNY Professional 16GB Class 10 SD Card was retailing for more than $45 each!  What to do?  I fired up my browser and started comparing prices online from different retailers.  I found Best Buy had this particular card on sale online for $27!  But vacation was a short time away and I couldn't wait for shipping.  So what I did was I printed out the page showing the product and pricing and brought it into my local Best Buy.  They price-matched the online price and I made three separate purchases (couldn't buy all three at the same time) - saved myself just about $60.

Of course that was months ago and prices have come down since then but for sure remember to compare prices, shop around, and buy the best card you can find!