How good is the DN-60?
 

It would be nice to hear more positive or negative comments before deciding to purchase this add on for my Canon XH-A1 and Windows 7 Premiere Pro CS5 editing system.

Greg, i use the EXACT same setup; XH A1, DN-60, Win7 64 bit, CS5.

Works flawlessly; i no longer have any HDV tapes, just a few CF cards. Feel free to ask any questions and ill answer them best as i can.

Panagiotis, if you had to swap out a cf card and continue rolling, how long before the DN 60 lets you pull the card to swap it out? How long does it take to swap out a card and start recording?

More questions for Panagiotis
 

Can you replace tape on the XH-A1 and keep recording the CF card on the DN-60 at the same time?
Have you experimented with how long the 4 AA's will last?
Can you use any CF reader to dump the video into your computer?
What is the maximum size of CF card that the DN-60 will accept?
How do you deal with poorly lit screen on the DN-60 while recording in low light areas?
Thanks for offering to help.

i have th dn60 , i bought it on the very first day of it release.

works ok.. have some errors but generally am very satesfied from this tool

when am filming events like weddings I prefer to shoot on tape and on cf at the same time....


i use a transend 64gb compact flash card and i have 4,5 hours of video.

the main problem that i found some times is that on few clips the audio is not sycronized with the video..

I use the dn60 with a canon xha1, premiere cs4 and win7 64bit

Anthony, what is the speed of the Transcend card your using? I didn't see the Transcend cards on the list of cards they suggest you use in the DN 60 . Maybe that's why you have some errors or audio sync problems?
What kind of errors are you having.

my transcend card have this specs

Ultra-fast 400X performance with four-channel support
Manufactured with brand-name MLC NAND Flash chips
Conforms to CF Type I standards
Data transfer rate: Read-90MB/sec (Max) / Write-60MB/sec (Max)


I wanted to buy a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB (90MB/s BUT is way to expensive .

Anyway , generally i dont have errors all the time.

only some times. when the clip is very long i have the error of not sychro with video..

how do i handle the above issue ^^^ i capture the video from the dn60 to the pc with firewire, like i do with tapes. and vouala! the audio is sychronized with the video on all the clips! strange but true! :)

sometimes my pc just can not edit few clips from the datavideo bin. they play with any player but i just can not edit them with any editing software that i have. the pc is freezing and the program stop working..

fast as you can; you stop recording, eject the old card, pop in the new card (assuming you have preformatted it for whatever you are about to use it for, otherwise it takes about 1 minute to format a 16GB card) and hit record again.

i preformat all the cards for the same HDV NTFS file system, so i just swap and go. later, i have to hit 'make media files' on each card and then get the files off the memory cards on my PC.

Transcend and Kingston cards i have found to be problematic; i use SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/sec cards; never had a problem. Transcend and Kingstons (and all the cheaper brands too) ive had dropped or green frames.

yes you can replace an HDV tape and still be recording to CF card (have to disable sync to tape). this is how i would shoot really long events; tape and CF when tape is about to run out. theoretically as long as you have juice and spare HDV tapes you could keep shooting indefinately.