Capturing with another Mini DV camera?

RomanJaquez

RomanJaquez

Well-known member
I am thinking about buying a miniDV camera so that I can use it to capture the footage from the DVX into my PowerBook G4. I am considering the Canon ZR100 Mini DV Digital Video Camcorder or something similar.

Is capturing with a camera of lower performance (than the DVX100A) going to loose quality of the video? What are the disadvantages of doing it this way... other than capturing from the DVX or a professional deck?

The only thing I will be worry about is loosing image and sound quality.

Thank you all,
 
Roman - DTP is right - It's digital info transferred over firewire so there's no loss in quality. I might suggest though that you check to make sure your editing software can properly control the camera. I use the Canon Elura 40. It's also used as a record deck for my helmet cam when I mountain-bike. Here's some screen grabs from Adobe's page to check for hardware compatibility.

Adobes hardware compatability page for Canon cameras:

45188595.jpg


The Panasonic page on Adobe's hardware compatibility page:

45188597.jpg

A bit more about Adobe's "conditional support"

45188596.jpg
 
are you guys sure that reading a tape recorder with another camera cannot create slight reading problems here and there (head-alignment kind of stuff)?

i did what you guys are saying time ago (tape recorded with dvx100 and captured using my smaller camera) and i experienced a number of drops here and there. since the dvx100 wasn't mine, i can't guarantee that was not the cause of the problem though.

Andrea
 
DV is a standard tape format. What might be throwing you here is that the Canon GL1 had a known glitch where tapes it recorded could only be read back by GL1s--otherwise there would be problems. But this is an isolated incident. MiniDV tapes should be as interchangeable as VHS tapes are in different VHS machines.

As far as capturing straight to Powerbook HD, the advantage is no capture times--you can edit instantly. The downside? If you have a hiccup with your system, even something stupid like a screen saver coming on at the wrong time, you'll lose your stream and have no back-up to recapture from. For set shots like you have in independent filmmaking, you can always run another take if something goes wrong, but for event work it is a pretty risky propostition.
 
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