Sony HC1 question (Barry)

ChuckS

ChuckS

Veteran
I just purchased a Sony HC1, cool little camera :thumbsup: Of coarse it doesn't come with a tape and neither Best Buy or Circuit City have any Sony DVM63HD in stock.

Anyway, what DV tapes would you recommend? There's a reasonable cost difference between the Sony DVM63HD/HDV tapes and the regular DVM60PRL/DV tapes, is it worth it?

Oddly enough the manual doesn't recomend using the higher grade tape. The only constraint is that the HC1 is not compatible with cassettes with Cassette Memory - what the hell is that? :undecided

Any help would be appreciated. The sooner I can get tapes the sooner I can post some HDV and DV clips - of coarse it will probably be footage of cars and planes. :engel017:
 
Don't worry about Cassette Memory -- it's extremely unlikely that you'd encounter one of those. When DV first came out, Sony pushed the idea of cassettes with memory chips in them to store certain details about the camera during the shoot, and marking clips and such. Well, nobody really used it, and the tapes cost a lot more. You'll almost never encounter them. Even if you did, I bet the tape would work in the camera, and the camera would just ignore the chip in the tape. I think I have one here, somewhere in the archives...

As far as tape compatibility -- it'll pretty much "work" with any tape, although with HDV you want to use the very, very best tape you can to help avoid dropouts. Sony put out a warning, basically acknowledging the 1/2-second dropout issue, here:

http://www.sonydigital-link.com/dime/hotnews/cam/cam_hdv_tape.asp?l=fr

Of course, their recommendation to avoid the problem is to use their expensive HDV tape. Is that self-serving? Maybe. But if what you're shooting is important, you have to do what you can to protect yourself. When I put a new, fresh MQ in the HD100, the first minute of footage I shot was *riddled* with dropouts. Probably due to whatever prior tape had been used in the camera, I don't know. But it convinced me that in my HD100, or any HDV camera I ever use, I'm gonna use the hard disk option whenever possible, and when it has to be tape, it will be the best tape. Don't know if I'll go with Sony HDV tapes or with Panasonic AMQ's, but there's no way I'd run a $3 TDK tape in there and expect decent results. Other choices could include Sony DVCAM tapes, and Digital Master tapes.

You'll find reports on the web where people say they don't get dropouts, and they're using Wal-Mart tapes. Could be true. But I wouldn't trust my footage on it. The potential severity of HDV dropouts is too risky -- I mean, if you're just playing around, then yeah, whatever -- but if what you're shooting is important, spring for the "good stuff" to give yourself the best chance of avoiding dropouts.

On Creative Cow, Steven Gotz says he's only been using the expensive tapes, and never had a dropout. Someone else mentions running 300 hours on their camera, all on MQ's, and only having 10 dropouts ever. I'd definitely say to stick with one brand and only one brand, buy them by the case, and never deviate.
 
Thanks Barry, I appreciate the advice. I did find some of the Sony HDV tapes - I paid about $15 each. I also found some of the same tapes online for about $12.00 ea/10. This is my personal camera for family vacations etc., so the footage has more sentimental value than anything else. For the price of this camera I thought it would be a good investment to play with HDV, see how it works in PPro and just experiment with it. I imagine that for ease of editing and mastering the majority of what I shoot will be DV so I'll probably also try the Sony DVM-60PRL $2.79 ea DV and the Sony DVM-60EX $7.37 for HDV/DV. I shouldn't run into any problems mixing those tapes should I?

I only had the opportunity to play for about an hour before the sun went down so I just used it in DV mode and I was quite surprised how good the picture looked. I'll probably shoot some HDV tomorrow and begin to capture and edit a bit of that to see how well it works.

Thanks again :cheesy:
 
I'd love to hear your experiences with the camera. I've heard some quite complimentary things about it, especially its CMOS performance, although I guess it has some sort of rolling-band shutter that can add an odd effect (like, when tilting up through a shot, I guess it can make objects "stretch" a little, etc). But the CMOS is intriguing; at NAB '03 when the HD1 was released, they had it sitting next to a CMOS HD camera, and the CMOS HD camera just blew the HD1 away, so I've been curious about the HC1.

And it's tiny tiny tiny! Man that is one small camera!

Well, good luck, and let us know how it goes...
 
I hate that everything is in a touchscreen menu, but I was pretty impressed with it when I picked it up and played with it. It had a mojo (not just resolution) which certainly separates it from other consumer cams. For the price, it's very nice machine.
 
Here's a pic from Sony's website.

HDRHC1.jpg
 
Barry_Green said:
I'd love to hear your experiences with the camera. I've heard some quite complimentary things about it, especially its CMOS performance, although I guess it has some sort of rolling-band shutter that can add an odd effect (like, when tilting up through a shot, I guess it can make objects "stretch" a little, etc). But the CMOS is intriguing; at NAB '03 when the HD1 was released, they had it sitting next to a CMOS HD camera, and the CMOS HD camera just blew the HD1 away, so I've been curious about the HC1.

And it's tiny tiny tiny! Man that is one small camera!

Well, good luck, and let us know how it goes...
Click to expand...
Here's some stills from an HDV timeline. http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/showthread.php?t=32781
There are some things that I need to figure out regarding PPro 1.5, but I have to do some work this afternoon so I won't have a chance to post any footage. My first impression was that this is a quality camera. It is fun to use. I wouldn't use it professionally, but there is certainly no buyers remorse. :grin:
 
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