Recording to tape and HDD
 

I'm going to be recording an event soon as was wondering if its possible to record to tape in HDV mode and record to a firewire HDD in DV mode. Has anyone done this before? Is there a setting in the menu to do this?

I think all you would need to do is enable "i.LINK DOWNCONV" in the menu. Then connect the camera to a laptop via the firewire cable and use some capture software there. On the Mac, BTV Pro would do this or you could use something like DV Rack on the PC. I'm sure you could also use a product like the firestore as well.

Thanks Boyd, I'm going to use a product similar to a Firestore in that it will capture DV but I don't think it will HDV. So what I was going to do was capture HDV on tape and DV on the external HDD so that I can edit SD immediately without importing video in FCP.

I've wondered about this stuff... Like; the external drive would appear to a computer as just another available storage device/volume? So, if the device was connected to a laptop, rather than directly into the camera... wouldn't it be possible to use CapDVHS or VLC to capture HDV directly from the camera to the external drive - by just setting your capture directory in VLC or CapDVHS to be on the external drive?

For capturing straight from the camera, the DV only recognition would present a problem with HDV acceptability, but surely the drive would have to accept any stream of data being tossed at it by a laptop - including HDV?

I imagine you aren't worried about the advantages of downconverting HDV to SD in software, rather than 'in-camera'. Interesting...