Firewire transfer question
 

I'm transferring old mini dv tapes (2003) from a gl-2 to a canon vixia hv30. I am doing this via firewire. In order for me to see what I am doing I hooked up an s video cable from the gl-2 to my tv. Will this confuse the camcorder or hurt the quality at all since it has an svideo and firewire both hooked up at the same time? I'm guessing the quality will be the same, but want to make sure.

Thanks,

Tony

The quality via Firewire should be just the same as the original if there are no dropouts, but I'm slightly curious as to why you are doing it this way. Are you just wanting a duplicate DV tape?

I would be importing the footage into a NLE and saving it another way as well, on a hard drive, flash drive memory card or DVD - the more ways the merrier. Once imported you have the option of doing some basic editing (in my case that would be to remove the inevitable footage of my feet or trousers as my thumb accidentally pressed the record button on the camera between scenes). The original or edited file can then be saved on tape again on the DV cam if it has DV in. This unfortunately has to be in real time and the scene detection might go depending on the settings/software used.

Thanks for the reply Colin. Yes, I am going to back it up on a hard drive also. Like you said I want as many backups as possible. I just want to make sure that I am not interfering with the quality coming from the firewire connection by having the playing camcorder (gl-2) also hooked up to the tv via svideo at the same time. It will be the same quality doing it this way compared to not having the svideo hooked to the tv?

Thanks,

Tony

I have always been led to believe that the digital chain either transmits the information or it doesn't. The recording to tape is the bit which could go wrong.

"I'm transferring old mini dv tapes (2003) from a gl-2 to a canon vixia hv30. I am doing this via firewire. In order for me to see what I am doing I hooked up an s video cable from the gl-2 to my tv. Will this confuse the camcorder or hurt the quality at all since it has an svideo and firewire both hooked up at the same time? I'm guessing the quality will be the same, but want to make sure."

This is not going to hurt anything.

What you are doing is no different than printing SD video to tape from computer via firewire and monitoring the process by hooking your camera to a tv via the s-video cable. Instead of printing off a timeline, you are feeding from another camera (which actually is using microprocessors of its own.) You could hook each camera to its own tv v S-video cables if you wanted.

Think about it: if monitoring while using S-video cables "hurt" things, nobody would have been able to edit.