Thanx

Need help buying Cannon GL1
 

Hey,

I'm currently looking to get my hands on a used GL1. If anyone here, or anyone you know is selling one, please let me know. Otherwise, recommendations on where to look for a used GL1 would also help. So far, all I have in mind is Ebay. They usually go for around 800 - 900 there.

- Thanks

There's one for sale right now in our Classifieds section.

Thanks for link, but I'm looking for somthing a little closer to $1,000 if not lower.

Make him an offer, Shawn. That's part of what the Classifieds is about.

Opteka 2X Telephoto on a GL1
 

I did it... I went ahead, and purchased a cheapo lens on ebay. Partly out of curiousity, partly out of necessity, mostly out of cheapness.

So, being the dutiful board citizen that I am, I decided to share my initial results. After finally recieving my new toy, I went out into my backyard to shoot some flora and fauna. After 15 minutes, a Mockingbird decided to grace me with it's presence. I noticed several things.

1) Shooting birds is for the birds. About the same time I get framed, zoomed, and almost focused, the little bugger has flown off. I have much more respect for those who shoot wildlife.

2) There is significant vignetting until halfway through the zoom.
It looks like I'm shooting through the middle of a donut. Mmmmm... Donuts...

3) There is only a slight improvement in the closeness. At 30 ft and full optical zoom, the subject is just out of focus, no matter how hard you try. At a little less than full zoom, the image is pretty clean.

4) There is an annoying little lens flare present in the lower left corner, shaped like a pentagon. It's almost like being haunted by the Chrysler logo.

Since I don't have any prior experience with a tele-converter, I can't compare it to anything. I can say, that even a slight improvement was worth the $39.95 I spent on it. Of course, as soon as I can, I'll replace it with a better lens.

Or buy a wide angle...

I've played with both the Sony and the Century Optics lenses. All are sharp at the high end with little lens flare so this may be a case of getting what you pay for. All of them vignette when zoomed out. My feeling is that the vignetting stops when you are at the mutiplied equivalent of the 20x of the original lens. So they should be considered add-ons.

Shooting birds takes lots of practice and songbirds are among the hardest.

1) Use a tripod.
2) Find the birds singing post. During the breeding season a territorial bird will often return to one branch to sing from. Set up in a blind or in the shadows and focus on that point.
3) Birds see VERY well. If there is interest I can post an essay on the topic of how well birds see and hear and why wearing camo is not such a bad idea.

It is much easier to use a big lens to film more stationary wildlife - ducks on a pond, herons, etc.

The latest (?) isse of Digital Videomaker has an interview with a filmaker working on a new documentary on grizzly bears. He primarily used an XL1 with a 600 mm lens. Given all of the conversion factors that is what, equivalent to a 4200mm lens?!? If you get farther away then it is easier to film without disturbing the wildlife.

Finally, practice, practice, practice. Film an hour and get snippets of useful footage. For the documentary mentioned above the cameraman was in the field for 250 DAYS! The life of the wildlife photographer......

GL1 audio question
 

I know the GL1 has no manual gain control for audio, but I was reading something that made it sound like the auto gain on the GL1 works more like a limiter than a variable auto gain--only attenuating sounds so loud they will clip, rather than adding gain to weak signals with the universally despised S/N disasters that typically ensue.

Can anyone either confirm or deny these reports?

The GL1 operates at full gain until the input signal exceeds a threshold, about 12 dB below clipping, then it starts to reduce the gain. It does not have the high degree of background noise pumping you get with many other camcorders, but you will hear changes in the noise floor if you are overdriving the input (or the build-in mic).

Also worth noting that the noise floor is substantially lower at the MIC ATT setting.

I found that using mic att almost cancels my shotgun.

Connecting an external mic disconnects the internal mic. It is a feature of the microphone stereo mini jack.

getting good audio on gl1
 

Hi,

I've heard a lot about how the gl2 has manual audio meters and I was wondering if there were accessories that I could buy for my gl1 to get similar control over the audio. I am interested in videoing quite a few interviews this summer using a wireless mic.

Thanks

A device like the Beachtek DXA-4P will provide you will channel-level control as well as XLR audio connections (which you'll probably need for most wireless receivers).

A couple companies (SignVideo for one) offer VU ,meters that will provide some indication. They connect to an audio output jack. With a bit of skill you can use them to tell when the GL1 goes into limiting/gain eduction mode.

The main three distributors of XLR adapters with level controls are Beachtek, Studio 1, and SignVideo.

They often run ads. in Videomaker, etc.

GL1 connection to Pinnacle
 

I've been trying to get my Studio 9 AV/DV setup to recognize my GL1. I thought it was the computer setup so I've been working with Pinnacle support. Yesterday I gave my camera to a friend who has a setup for his two Sony cameras and a DVD record deck with IEEE 1394. They couldn't find my camera. This morning, I called Canon and was told that any tapes recorded in LP cause the camera to not be recognized. On page 22 of the manual is a box that says the tapes can't be dubbed if recorded in LP. That's the only clue to the whole mess. Anybody know of a way to get all my kids' high school memories onto DVD from these LP tapes? Direct record to VCR doesn't work very well.

Off-hand, buy, borrow or rent a 2nd miniDV camera and transfer the LP footage to that camera's tape (recording in SP mode) via Firewire. The camera does not have to be a top-line unit but simply capable of recording from an external device.

Prospectively, as you've painfully learned, never use LP mode on any camera no matter how compelling you believe the reason. It's a well-worn topic here and you have a bit of company in your distress.

Is there a way to output via Firewire to another camera or does it require some other mode? The manual isn't particularly helpful. The reason I recorded in LP in the first place was that all the events were more than an hour by ten or fifteen minutes. I thought I'd done a good thing. Guess not.

See "Dubbing to/from a Tape..." around p.99 of your manual. (The DV data stream is always sent to the Firewire port during playback.)

Well, setting the camera to SP and 12-bit audio and recording a fresh tape gave me the same results. Neither computer recognizes the camera no matter how I attach it. I tried both 1394 drivers and used RegClean. DV IN flashes in a repeatable code but it doesn't show up in device manager. Canon helpline says the port is bad and send it in for repair. Sound right?

your issue has nothing to do with tapes. in fact, connecting the GL1 to your computer and then to studio 9 while in 'CAMERA' will work and you could 'capture' live video being sent out the firewire port. I'd strongly suspect the port, since you've tried the alternate computer test and nothing was detected there. Of course, this assumes you tried a different firewire cable also.

Bad artifact problems- GL1
 

Hi, did a short search for this but could not find any answers.

I have an older GL1 that has been great for me throughout the years. However, it has started giving me some artifact problems that can be best seen here in this short clip:

http://www.tedandnicki.com/gl1/camera_gl1.mov

This particular problem occurred on a tape that had been used once before, however, I took a brand new tape and tried recording on that, only to encounter the same problem. What is strange is that after a while of recording on the used tape (maybe after 15 minutes), everything looked fine and the video I recorded was useable.

I tried cleaning the GL1 with a head cleaning tape and that did not do anything to remedy the problem.

Is this a problem with the heads? Anyone else familiar with this?

Thanks,
Ted

Ted,

This issue has been discussed before. For me it took a head alignment at Cannon to fix the problem. The GL-1 heads are somewhat notorious for getting out of alignment. Once fixed keep in mind that some of you old tapes may not replay properly if the heads were slightly out of alignment but playable when originally recorded. I lost playback capability on 25 tapes because of this.

Regards,

Mark

I'm going to have to agree with mark on this....the fact that the artifacts are aligned with the left edge is intriguing...I've not seen this before...and it would make some sense if we we're talking analog video...but perhaps alignment will cause this in digital as well.

Try another cleaning or two...and only use new tapes...if it doesn't straighten out...I think its time for a service call...not bad for a camera of this age.

Barry

my gl-1 does the exact same thing, on the left edge of the video.
and it's totally intermittent.

strange problems with my GL1...
 

hi everyone.

i did a search on this, but didn't find anything so here goes...

my GL1 is doing something really strange. it will randomly decide not to record any sound on the tape at all while i am shooting video. sometimes a single tape i've shot will have a clip with no sound, right in the middle of other clips that are fine. it seems to be completely random and intermittent.

the camera has been doing this for a while, but this weekend i had my first opportunity to capture some video onto a computer, and i learned something more about this.

the clips that don't have sound can't be captured at all. the computer had no idea what to do with them. any clip with sound could be captured easily, but the clips without sound could not.
i'm guessing there's some sort of timecode missing as well as the sound...?

the camera also produces the same type of visual artifacts as someone posted about recently, on the left of the video image. it does this completely intermittently as well.
in that thread everyone was talking about bad head alignment...
could that be the culprit for my missing sound and timecode as well?

any ideas?

-martino

"in that thread everyone was talking about bad head alignment...
could that be the culprit for my missing sound and timecode as well?"

This is purely speculative, but yes it very well could be. The tolerances for laying bits onto tape are bogglingly tight.

ken, i think you are probably right.
i was thinking about it last night, and i bet it's the head alignment being off, and the intermittency is probably tied to whether or not the tape gets threaded up just the right way when i load it.

i shot some video last night on a tape that had previously had no sound, but last night the sound was there and everything was fine. the only variable was that i had taken the tape out and put it back in...

so - how do i go about contacting a canon service center to get the heads aligned? and what's it going to cost me roughly?

-martino

Use Canon's GL1 Service Locator page to find out where to get the camera repaired.

cool. thanks, ken

GL1 Capture Problems
 

I've been working with my GL1 for about 3 years now.

Recently I've tried to capture footage off of some tapes (freshly shot video). When I view the footage using the DV controls in either Adobe Premiere 6 or Sony Vegas 4, it's fine. However, when I hit capture (either batch or manual) the video will capture for approximately 2 seconds and then block / pixelate in both black and white and then a spectrum of colors (think TV static noise, except more blocky; this will weave in and out of the video occaisionally).

I was thinking about getting a video-head cleaner, but viewing tapes through the LCD and analog composite out to TV works fine. PLAYING through the IEEE 1394 port works fine as I've already mentioned. CAPTURE is what gives me issues.

I've already tried this on two different computers and with two different IEEE 1394 cables.

Anyone had experience with something like this?

Here's a screenshot of what it looks like (the blocked pixels keep moving)

http://adev.freeunixhost.com/camerror.JPG

Is there any updated pricing info on having your LCD display go out in normal vie mode? I just had this happen and am somewhat cheesed...?

GL1 or my optura 300! lots of questions.
 

well i have recently really gotten into videographing. I film for my friends DVD, and really enjoy filming.

About a month or 2 ago i purchased my first nice camera, ( used to have a cheap-o sony camera that was about 500$ and given to me.)

I got the optura 300 with the canon wide angle and biggest battery. Now i love this camera and takes ncie film and not to metion not bad quatlity digital pictures. But when i watch my footage in comparison to my friend ( owner of the dvd) Gl-1, i hate my camera. My night shots are horrible and i just feel like my film sucks.

So now i have been thinking a lot about getting a gl-1, for price reasons. i also hear a lot about people liking the gl-1 more then the new gl-2.?

So i have come to this.... if i can sell my optura 300 with all i have for it ( about 6 hours of usage time) for a good price im going to get a gl-1.

Now the questions:
1. is it worth it? to buy a 3 year old camera that is discountinued?
2. is a bigger camera what i want after getting used my small 300?
3. does canon or anyone still make parts for the gl-1? like extra batterys, wide angles lenses, filters, lights etc?
* will gl-2 parts fit the gl-1?
4. if my gl-1 happens to break some how, will canon fix it? will it be expenisve?

i know i have more, but the more info i can get the better! Please help me out guys! Thanks!

bump

Patrick-

First off, I know nothing about the canon optura you already own. I did buy a used gl1 to use in addition to the sony pd150 that I already had. I now use the gl1 more than the pd150, mainly because of its big zoom (20x). I film wildlife where a big zoom is definitely needed. Before I bought the sony, all I read about was how much better shooting in dvcam (pd150) was over minidv (gl1). I really can't tell the difference in the footage between the two cameras. The only thing that the gl1 is lacking is high-quality audio. That can be easily fixed by getting a good shotgun mic and there are a lot of options to setting up the gl1 for wireless mics. If I could do it over again, I would have bought 3 used gl1's for the price of one new pd150. The audio upgrades are not that expensive (I'm guessing no more than $500). One video quality area that the gl1 isn't as impressive as the pd150 is in low-light situations. This is my opinion for whatever it's worth. Oh, from what I've read there wasn't a lot of upgrades from the gl1 to the gl2.

One more thing. You can still get all the accessories you need for the gl1 (batteries, lenses, etc.).

thanks a bunch!!!! now only if i can get my hands on a super mint gl-1 !! where did u get yours ?

I got mine off of eBay, but you have to be real careful. I emailed the guy and told him I wanted to speak with him on the phone before I proceded with the transaction. There are quite a few of them listed in the $1,000 to $1,200 range.

Quick question! help price on gl1
 

OK, a buddy of mine has a used GL-1 for sale. He said 1150$ with everything it came with. box, charger, cords, etc.

the camera was highly used, but never had a problem with it.

is this a reasonable price? or should it be lower?

what should i look @ to determine if its worth buying?

if he had insuranc eon it, will it still be with the camera incase i breaks?

thanks!

Never posted a reply to this, but here is the resolution:

Sent my camera into Canon for repair. Got it back 2 months later. Total cost: $400.

Expensive, but better than having to buy another camera!

Ted

Interlacing problems with GL1
 

Do people notice a slightly annoying amount of interlacing? Maybe it is because I shoot a lot of action. It is usually the worst during lower light conditions, but a little bit of it is present all of the time.
--Carleton