Re: The second elephant in the room

Aloha Jeremiah,

You gave Chris a lot of good information, but I'm not sure the part about tape speeds is exactly corret.

"As far as 25 mb/sec being the "limit" on mini dv tapes- it's a function of mini dv tapes. You could run the tape at twice the speed to get a DVCPRO50 signal, or at 4 times the speed to get a DVCPRO HD signal, but dv tape is too flimsy to run at four times speed and be reliable"

It is my understanding that the real problem is the DV codec boards, not the tape speed. I believe Panasonic uses the same physical size tape in a bigger cartridge for DVCPro HD and 50. The DV codec is limited by definition to 25 mbps and these boards were ganged together by Panasonic (and JVC) to deliver higher end formats. DVCPro 50 uses 2 codec boards (and 8 heads like you said) and DVCPro 100 uses 4 codec boards and 16 heads. It's amazing they can get this to write to such thin tape, JVC used full sized cartridges and head assemblies for D9.

Aloha,

Ken