Hello

I currently have a panasonic PV-DV952 and a collection of videos from the Panasonic. I am contemplating selling my Pana to a friend and buying a GL2. My question is if I will be able to play the tapes recorded in the panasonic in a Gl2 and output the video to a tv or computer?

Thanks for your time

The GL2 should be able to play any properly rcorded MiniDV format tape. However, if either the recorder used to make the tape or the GL2 are out of alignment with respect to each other the tapes may not play reliably. This caution applies to any two camcorders.

If there is a problem - maybe your friend will allow you to cammy to cammy tape in the future - yes?

How many tapes are talking about? 10 -50 - 100? Maybe you could get them pro stored to a tape of your liking!

Have you been recording "capturing" to your computer already? If you've been doing this already from your Panny Cammy then I reeeeally can't see a problem. When I was researching for my lovely XM2, I took my Dell laptop to the cammy shop. I could then confirm everything - yes?

Hope this has been useful - Grazie - oops sorry Chris - "Graham"

Thank you for the replies gentlemen.
I currently have 23 tapes from the Panasonic. I haven't got around to capturing any of the tapes on my pc yet (new baby) but I'm headed that way as soon as I get a chance. I just wanted to make sure I won't have any hang-ups using the Canon to send the Panny tapes to my puter.
I won't have a chance to just sit down and transfer all the tapes in one time period and I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking my friend to borrow the cam on an ongoing basis to do so. He's a nice guy though, he told me it wouldn't be a problem if I needed to.
I'm assuming the head allignment should'nt cause any problems becasue both the cams will be so new? My 952's only @ 9 months old.

I really like the laptop idea; I wish I had one for testing purposes as you did.

Thanks again
David

When I visited my brother in AZ, he and I worked to transfer videos into his VAIO PC using my Canon GL1. His camera (before he bought my GL1 so I could buy the GL2) was the Panasonic EZ1 3-chip camera, a few years old, but great video and photos. However, the EZ1 doesn't have iLink/Firewire on it. So...

After hooking up the digital cable, the only gotcha we noticed from the Panasonic-based source tape was the intermittent time-code display on the VAIO. Because of this, I couldn't use the automatic scan/capture routine on the PC since it is time-code based and would get lost VERY easily. But the time-code issue was the only problem we encountered. Stills, video, audio, all of that worked very well using the GL1 to transfer it.

PS - By "intermittent time-code" above, I mean the running time-code display would work, stop, work, stop, etc. Weird, but not a show-stopper!

Terry near Baltimore, MD USA