2 DV transport recording solution
 

Would this work?

For DVCPRO50 and for up to 1080p30:

Could someone figure how to hook two cheap DV cameras as recorders, with some circuit that would record one frame to one, next to another, then would have to be combined in post.

Surely beats some 20,000 euro DVCPRO HD deck.

Radek

I wasn't quite sure what to do with your post -- it was in the P2 forum but it does not concern P2 or the HVX200. So I've moved to to Alternative Imaging Methods. It's an interesting concept, but who's going to build the circuit?

I don't really see this as being effective. Its not the same as doing Raid with hard drives. It would take some major reverse engineering to get a cheaper DV camera to record 15fps (or 12fps) of HD video onto minidv tape, so that it can be alternated between two cameras. Plus lets not forget that minidv is 5:1 compressed, and samples 4:1:1...so unless you did some sort of hack around this you would be losing that information. Essentially what you are talking about would require a total rewrite of the internal A/D converter and DSP of the camera....which means it would be easier just to try and build a DVCProHD deck from scratch.

In a way, you could maybe have camcorders like take alternating fields, and interlace them in post...but once again that requires some major reverse engineering...plus you lose the 'progressiveness' of your footage.

If you mean shooting the top half of the frame with one DV camera and the bottom half of the frame with another DV camera then combining them in post to form one frame, someone on these boards tried it before. Not sure what came up of it.

Unless you mean what the other posters mentioned above.

Well they tried doing an image splitter optically and it seemed like it worked more or less if I remember that experiment, but if I recall the end result wasn't worth all the effort.

To make a recording device like this you would have to find some way to digitally split the image DVCPRO50HD image into two standard def DV images...then you would have to sync all three cameras cpu clocks...not an easy task.