Can the A1 record via Firewire direct to hard drive?
 

Not having the A1 manual to look thru--I need to dl from the Canon site--I wanted to ask those who have used the A1 have you ever recorded direct to disk?

If that is possible, can the A1 also record to tape AND record to an external hard drive at the same time?

I ask the above because I shoot talking head interviews often in a studio. I was wondering if I can go straight to my FCP Mac direct from the A1 thus avoiding the labor intensive loading of footage into the edit system. If I can also record to tape at the same time, I will then have an archive of the footage aside from the back-up hard drive.

Thanks in advance to those who care to share.

Be well

Rob

Rob,

No problem. The Firestore FS-C from Focus Enhancements (www.focusinfo.com) is a solution for the Canon. If you want some additional functionality and can set up a laptop, I would consider DV Rack from Serious Magic (www.seriousmagic.com) or Console from Canon. Both of the latter feature monitors and scopes and Console allows you to control many of the A1s functions right from your laptop. All of them allow simultaneous hard drive and tape recording.

Bill Doyle

Bill-

Thanks for the quick response.

All of your answers were exactly what i wanted to read.

In response, do u know if the canon software works with the mac OSX?

Thanks in advance.

Be well.

Rob

Canon's Console software is PC only. If you have one of the new Intel Macs that can run on Windows XP, then you can use it that way.

Rob,

There is a company that was making an OSX version, but I can't remember the name. I know I signed up for email updates on their progress and haven't heard anything, so I don't know its status.

The FS-C does one thing, but is portable. The other two give you a lot of other options, but require the laptop in the field. I use a Mac exclusively and will go the XP route on Parallels if I have to, but I would suggest you find someone with Windows and check out the demos; both companies have a 30-day trial. I need to do that myself as I do a lot of interview work solo and I like DV Rack's ability to help set up and monitor things for you, but the Canon software allows all of those menu changes that the A1 has to offer.

Lastly, you might want to head over to the "Direct to Disk" forum here for more info.

Let us know what you find.

Bill

The OS X program being developed is called ScopeBox. Hopefully it'll be as good as it sounds.

http://www.scopebox.com/

-Terence

EDIT: Search the forums for a thread called "DV Rack-type software for Mac?". At the end it has a few details on Scopebox, which unfortunately states that it won't support HDV at its initial release because Quicktime doesn't support it. So I guess it won't be a solution for a Canon XH-A1 for a while.