Please recommend a deck for playing back Canon and Sony miniDV

	Re: Please recommend a deck for playing back Canon and Sony miniDV by Mike Johnson on Oct 22, 2008 at 1:50:14 pm Hello Blake, Are you the same Blake Porter as the one from fieldproducer.com? We use the Sony M15U decks. The will play and record DV, HDV, and DVCAM and support both mini and full sized cassettes. We use the Canon XH-A1, XL-H1a, and HV30 and have had no problems in the Sony decks with either SD or HDV tapes. The M15U will allow you to capture your HDV footage natively as HDV, transcode to ProRes, or downconvert to SD. The M15U runs $1,750 from B&H. If that is too pricey for you, an alternative would be to use a small HDV camcorder. The Canon HV20s and HV30s work well for capturing - not sure about printing though. The HV30 is $700 from B&H and the HV20 has been discontinued. As far as matching FCP timecode, I assume you are referring to the sequence timecode. This is something that is not supported through FireWire. We ran into this problem trying to conform our show submission masters to The Outdoor Channel standards. They want the show to start at exactly 01:00:00;00. The only way we could do it was to black and timecode the first few minutes of the tape, then do an Edit to Tape starting the leading bars at 00:58:00;00. Unfortunately the M15U does not allow you to custom set the TC - it starts at 00:00:00;00 by default unless you have a blacked tape. The deck we used to black tapes is the Sony DSR-2000. Its $13,800 and does not support HDV. The Sony M25AU and M35U both have "advanced timecode features", but I've not worked with either so I'm not sure exactly what that refers to. But if it is necessary to have a specific TC on the tape, then these might be worth looking into more. Hope this helps! And good luck this season! Mike Johnson Final Cut Pro Editor Drury Outdoors www.druryoutdoors.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Please recommend a deck for playing back Canon and Sony miniDV by Mike Johnson on Oct 22, 2008 at 5:16:40 pm We currently submit our shows on DVCAM. They do prefer Betacam over DVCAM, so you should be good there. For next year, we are transitioning to HD for TV. I read the regs for TOC, and they will only accept HDCAM or DVCPRO HD masters. Not good news considering the cheapest deck between the two is $25,000 (DVCPRO HD) - and its doesn't support FireWire, so you have to come up with another card or device to run to HD-SDI. Mike Johnson Final Cut Pro Editor Drury Outdoors www.druryoutdoors.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Please recommend a deck for playing back Canon and Sony miniDV by Mike Johnson on Oct 22, 2008 at 5:22:52 pm External Timecode doesn't work for me. If I set my deck to external TC, everything is recorded with a TC of 00:00:00;00. Not really sure how you are getting it to be frame accurate because TC out is not supported on any version of FCP that I'm aware of. Mike Johnson Final Cut Pro Editor Drury Outdoors www.druryoutdoors.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Please recommend a deck for playing back Canon and Sony miniDV by Mike Johnson on Oct 22, 2008 at 7:07:44 pm I believe that term would be "sync". Typically some sort of TC generator would be used. In the M15U, the generator is built in, but unfortunately not programmable. Not sure if there is a TC generator that will run on Lanc or Control-S - the M15U has both. If so, that could be an option, but I'm not sure how that would link to FCP. Maybe there is someone out there on the Cow who knows of a way to sync the sequence TC to a deck. Not sure why the link messed up. Let me know if it happens again. Something must be wrong with my Cow profile??? Mike Johnson Final Cut Pro Editor Drury Outdoors www.druryoutdoors.com Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Please recommend a deck for playing back Canon and Sony miniDV by Michael Gissing on Oct 25, 2008 at 9:51:36 pm A couple of options. http://www.generalmanual.com/Recorders/Sony-HVRM35U-HDV-Videocassette-Recor... This deck should handle all your playback formats. It also has an SDI output that can be HD or SD. This is better quality than downconverting via DV firewire. To solve your other problem of laying back to tape with proper machine control & T/c, the only Deck in HDV that I know of is the HDV 1500. You have to feed in HDSDI and control the deck via 9 pin. I assume you have a card (Decklink or Kona). Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index