HVR-1500 - why does Sony hate me?
 

In regards to the new HVR-1500 deck, has anyone heard anything that would lead them to believe that it will one day have HD-SDI *IN* instead of just HD-SDI out? It's so close to being the perfect deck, but I really need to be able to feed in hdsdi...

BTW, for those who haven't seen it, I posted the HVR-1500 promo video on my blog. Seems like there's almost no information about this deck, so I thought folks might be curious:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/dis...ne/063245.html

Well your problem can be easily solved by the HD Connect LE, does HDV to HD SDI, made by Convergent Design, a DVInfo sponsor. We have two and they work as advertised, only caution is they'll also do HDV to SD SDI and the downconvert is not too flash, the HDV to HD SDI is about as good as it gets though.

Unfortunately what I'd need is to go HD-SDI -> HDV. There are plenty of folks selling boxes to go the other way (the Convergent box, as well as the miranda box and others) but the only HD-SDI -> HDV device I know of is a product that was announced by JVC at NAB last year. Unfortunately, there's no sign of it shipping any time soon, and MSRP is nearly $10,000.

So, I'm still stuck with the same problem that there's no way to get an HD-SDI signal into the HVR-1500.

Sorry, you are indeed correct.
The full HD Connect is I think supposed to be able to do what you want but it seems to have been shelved or just left on the back burner.
Technically I think what you want would be quite a challenge. The 15 frame GOP of HDV could pose many problems. HD SDI with machine control implies frame accuracy, that'd require complete rebuilding of the HDV GOP sequence I think.

Probably all you want to do is make a dub and don't need things like insert edits etc but the designers would be nervous about a box that looks like it can do certain things based on its inputs that in practice it will not do. Even in SD land it took Convergent Design quite a while to get firewire to SD SDI working correctly with frame accurate edit control. Also I don't know what'd happen with TC in all this.

At the moment your only viable path would be to capture to HDD from HD SDI, render to m2t and PTT on a HDV deck. That's going to be time consumming and require a pretty fast RAID and CPU.

I'm kind of curious though as to why you want to go from HD SDI to HDV, that's quite a step down quality wise.

I'm interested in HD-SDI->HDV for a few reasons - let me explain one. I've got three Canon XL-H1s, and I'm looking at getting Panasonic's new AV-HS300G HD-SDI switcher. Then I could do three camera field production, switched live. However, I need a way to capture the output of the AV-HS300G. I can get analog component out of it and then record with one of my HVR-M15Us, but I'd rather stay HD-SDI. There aren't a ton of other affordable HD capture solutions. This is for student use (I'm with a university) so I'm not too excited about asking students to start buying HDCam tapes for their productions. My fallback is to go with XDCamHD, as I can get a deck with HD-SDI in, but we've already got a pretty decent HDV tape/harddrive workflow so I was hoping to stick to that.

I think not including HD-SDI in on the HVR-1500 is more an issue of market protection than technical limitations. Sony wants to keep pros thinking about XDcamHD and HDCam, not about HDV.

Just checked my M15U manual and sorry you're out of luck, the component connections are SD output only.
I've got a M25U elsewhere but I'm pretty certain it's much the same, no ability to record from HD component inputs.
I don't think the issue has anything to do with any conspiracy theory stuff. The HD SDI to HDV conversion may have many technical issues plus there's probably not a lot of demand for it. The XL-H1 feeds 4:2:2 into HD SDI and for OB work broadcasters would feed that through a HD SDI switcher and then HD SDI to the network, they'd record to HDCAM, not HDV.
I know of at least one local large network shooting lots of HDV but they generally ingest to either DB or HDCAM SR, to them HDV is a viable acquisition format but that's as far as it goes. They like it because the cameras are so cheap they can give one to an OS correspondant and if it doesn't come back no big deal plus he can be a one made unit with something that small.

Back to your issue, I'd really suggest you have a talk to the guys at Convergent Design, they'll probably be able to fill you in on the technical issues at hand doing the conversion and tell you if they have a solution at hand. They've been very helpfull to us, if you can convince them there's a market for what you want and they can do it for the right price they'll be onto it pronto.