Yeah, although I bought the A1 for personal use, we couldn't switch to Canons at work for that very reason--we want to shoot 24p and need decks. A camera, while frustratingly slow, can work in personal stuff but in a professional environment you need to slap a tape in and out a zillion times a day with one hand and go. Can't do that with a little camera.

So, what is the best solution for someone looking for an editing deck for their Canon XH-A1? Also, why doesn't Canon make their own editing deck for their camcorders? I see a lot of Sony editing decks available.

The best solution would be to buy the little single chip camera and use it. Chris says it will play both 24F and 30F. Second best solution is to use the A1.

If you are shooting 60i, there's no problem. Sony decks will play the 60i footage.

I bought mine for personal use too, with the possibility of growing into event videography. I think a Firestore would be the ultimate answer, forgoing a deck altogether. Unless I'm missing something.

If you use a Firestore you would then have to figure out the best way to archive your footage before you delete it from the drive.

Thanks for pointing that out Bill. That's the amateur in me not even being aware of that. I don't shoot enough to worry about archiving anything considerable. I am just beginning to fill a 250GB hard drive and of course, assume it will last forever. So in the pro world then, am I hearing you guys archive with the original tapes??

On this topic.. i popped a tape into my Sony M15U not realizing it had 24F on it... now it seems to be stuck and there is no force eject button... ideas?

Wade, just last week I went back for a client into some footage that was 15 years old. We file all our original tapes basically forever. A hard drive isn't a safe place to store original footage. In the past 5 years I've seen 4 firewire drives die for no apparent reason. In two cases the drives were placed in new enclosures and fired up, but the other two could not be resurrected.

If you edit with FCP, you can drag your files in groups of under 4.7 gigs to DVDs and burn DVDs for storage. But that's a hassle, and it's still not your original. As long as you have original tapes filed, and burn your project files to CD, you can rebuild your show on anybody's compatible system.

I'm not a tapenazi. I think we'll all be shooting on some form of solid state device one of these days and we'll be able to store an hour of high def footage on a device the size of a stick of gum, but we're not there yet.

A Firestore does makes sense if you shoot long events. Usually we don't save original from 2 hour speeches--just the master tape and DVD. My feeling at this time is that good quality tape is the cheapest and most reliable thing available for what I do. Others may not have the concerns I do about long term storage.

Matthew--I've had tapes refuse to eject before with a Sony DSR1800 deck. Pull the lid off your deck and see if there are some instructions there for getting a stuck tape out. Our decks have that. Also, sometimes you can power down the deck, unplug it from the wall for a couple of minutes, power it back up and hit the eject button and it will come out. The fact that it's 24p shouldn't cause a tape jam.

well, it might be a conicidence. Been unpluuged all night... still wont eject. I dont see any removal instructions...

Matt

Plan B.
What I've done is pull the lid off, turn the deck back on and look around and see what's happening. Last time I had a jam what happened was that somebody had given me a DVCAM tape with a piece of tape on it that kept the flap on the tape from opening all the way, and it was causing the opposing flap in the deck to stick. I pushed the deck piece open, gently, and the tape came out. I've also had to go in and cut a tape to release it, and that sucks.

Will it fast forward or rewind? If so, do that first.

On the firestore thing...couldn't you record to both!? Obviously you're limited to the length of the tape, but I thought you could record to firestore for ease and tape to archive.

They're also cheaper.

Wont do anything. just sits liek a frozen lump. No motor noises on eject or anythign, just seems like the deck refuses to do anything.

Absolutely right, Simon... I was just going to point this out myself... when using a FireStore or similar FireWire hard disk recorder (which eliminates the limitations of tape length as well as the tedious video capture process entirely), all you have to do is simply record to tape and to the FireStore at the same time. This creates an immediate archival copy of your video as well as a back-up confidence copy in case anything goes wrong with the tapeless recording.

You can set up the configuration to allow for the tape and the FireStore to remain in sync, where the pause / record button on the camcorder triggers both at the same time, making each a shot for shot copy of the other, or you can have the tape roll independantly of the FireStore. There are a variety of options but the point is that this method gives you an edit-ready file which bypasses the video capture process while at the same time providing you with a copy on tape for archive and backup purposes.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the use of an editing deck in digital video? After I import video to my computer from my camera, it doesn't enter the picture again for the rest of the post-production process -- do others do things differently? Or is the deck only useful to teams, so someone can be out filming with the primary camera at the same time someone else is importing footage?