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HDV Rack, as a total solution, would give you far more than just a monitor. I cannot overemphasize the usefulness of the disk recording feature alone -- it's incredible. And, it totally and completely removes any worry of HDV dropouts (1/2-second freeze-ups). If I could only have one or the other, I'd vote for HDV Rack.
However, the monitoring is not quite equivalent to a true HD monitor yet.
The output from a Sony Z1's component cables will only give an *uncompressed* look at full refresh rates, but will not show you what the HDV compression is doing to your footage. And that's an important distinction. If you're recording to tape (or to HDV Rack's hard disk, or to a FireStore) your footage is getting compressed, and the way MPEG compression works, that compression can be nearly transparent or it can be quite intrusive. You need to know what your footage really, really looks like, not just what an uncompressed version looks like on a component monitor, because if you're recording that footage, what it looks like on the analog outputs is, frankly, irrelevant. Only what gets recorded matters.
And the only way you're going to see what you're actually recording is through the firewire port -- whether through HDV Rack, or through some sort of firewire-to-analog converter... if someone made an HDV-to-analog-component converter (like a Miranda HDV-to-HD-SDI converter, but to analog component) then I think that would be a very valuable tool, that would let you view the post-compression footage on your analog monitor.
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