Question about recording to tape and CF with camera control off.
 

I'm shooting a 2 hour event tomorrow and it seems like this should work, just wanted to get some feedback.

I've got the camera set up to not control the external recorder. I start tape and manually start the CF recorder. Since I've got a 32GB card I can record over 2 hours straight on the card. I'll switch tapes at an hour, of course.

In my tests the CF card records right through the tape change (as you'd expect it to) and without any loss of audio. My FX1 will drop audio for a second on tape change.

So I think this will work, but wanted to run it by the experts here. The CF recorder still seems to get time code from the camera, what will happen when I switch tapes? Will it screw up the CF recording somehow? I don't care about syncing the TC to the tapes, the tapes are 100% for backup and this edit won't be so complex as to require the TC be identical on the backup tapes.

Thanks for the help! Loving my Z7U!

Bryan, you probably know the answer by now but the answer is that when the tape is restarted there will be disruption to the signal recorded on the MRC-1. The reason (according to Sony) is that the Long GOP of the MPEG-2 signal has to be formed to record the tape properly and since the camera can only output one stream it must be disrupted for the MRC-1.

I wonder how they resolved that for the Z5...

According to the Sony document it affects all Hybrid recorders but, of course, only when they're recording HDV.

Bryan what I have done is to turn off the camera sync button on the MRC1K before you stop the camera to change tapes, as this should keep the MRC1K recording fine.

Then when I place the tape back in the camera and start to record again I turn the camera sync button back on.