has anyone recorded 3 hour clips w/150?

[mikeymic]

I'm considering buying one of these to allow me to cheaply shoot, edit, archive a band...they play 3 hour sets.

has anyone done this yet? is it reliable? can you hit stop and start quickly and not lose anything? this way it would be divided into clips and maybe the 3 second pre-record would make it so you wouldn't miss anything.

[Nick Sammons]

Straight from the Panny website:

"one 32GB SDHC card can hold up to 3 hours in the PH mode mode, 4 hours HA, 5.3 hours at HG mode and 12 hours in the HE mode."

Camera is extremely reliable. I'm very pleased with my HMC. Interesting thought about dividing clips. I'm assuming you want to do this just to keep songs organized for editing?

However, even with the Pre-Rec on, you will still have a slight gap if you stop/start to divide clips. If you only want to have markers between tracks, you could use the "index" to make markers in camera (up to 100 markers per clip).

[mikeymic]

the reason is two-fold:

songs organized...good reason.

i feel that if i hit the stop button that media is now committed to the card and i can breath easy that i won't lose a full 3 hour shot. could you imagine?

[Nick Sammons]

I suppose.

If it helps, I filmed a long show a few weekends ago at a House of Blues where I rolled an hour and a half of footage, then another hour and a half, two clips on two 16 GB cards for the whole night. If I had a 32 GB I could've rolled nonstop. The HMC150 is solid-state recording (no moving parts) so really in theory you should trust it more than a tape deck or hard drive. It's just new to us, a new workflow, so naturally it is hard to trust for some.

What you may want to consider however, is if you are purely "archiving" shows, you may still want a camera with a tape deck to just stack tapes. But if you are editing and throwing them on a DVD for a little more pizazz, the HMC is more than able to handle taping 3 hour sets, even in full quality HD.

[mikeymic]

thanks.

which cards did you use? they forced me to buy the more expensive cards and only had stock on the 32gb card which i got discounted (yes b&h discounted cause they had no 16gbs) and then i bought 3 8gb cards.

[Nick Sammons]

Interesting. Maybe I'll go buy a discounted 32 GB card while I can too. ;-)

[mikeymic]

they gave me $20 off...so instead of $273 it was $253. not that big of a savings, but i def played it up...you know i layed out $5k by the time it was over.