Just got my XL2- Is it too good to edit from?
 

Now that i finally have my XL2, I'm considering getting the smallest and cheapest miniDV camera I can find to go with it. Hear me out. I have no DV deck and cannot afford one right now (still paying off half of my XL2). But I'm not willing to edit from my new camera. I see it as a dangerous waste of head use and servos and all that. My last canon camera (elura) eventually stopped working (it had a rough life though), and the first part to go was the physical tape functions (motors/servos).

Should I be worried about editing from my XL2? What is the least expensive thing that has 24p dv cassette playback and firewire?

Thx for readin
-josh

Your cheap mini dv camera doesn't need to have 24p to play back the footage of the XL2, unless I'm mistaken. But I think once it's on your mini dv, anything can play it back.
You only need to look at a camera with DV in/out (unless you only need DV out if you only export to DVD or something).

Look at the private Classifieds boards, maybe put an ad?
Or ebay or something else?
You should find a cheap minidv cam for something like 300 dollars, even less if it's second hand.

Other then printing back to tape, if all you need is to output to a monitor as you edit, then all you need is a converter such as Canopus ADVC110.

well...
 

...all i need to do is go out to my PC. From there I'm golden.

Can I get confirmation on the question of whether a cheap consumer dv camera could play back 24p XL footage? I can't seem to find an answer to this on the web.

Also, how logical is my concern over the extra head use of editing? I edit digitally of course, so we're really ony talking about the capture process.

If it was a DVX i wouldnt care but I love my XL too much.

Thx again
-josh

Joshua,

Yes, you can put a 24p tape into a cheaper camcorder and firewire it to your computer. I have done it without any problem at all. The reason it works is that the 24p is laid to tape with 3:2 or 2:3:3:2 pull-down, so it becomes 60i to meet the NTSC DV spec. Since 1394 ("firewire") is simply data transfer, the "A Frame" flags in the 24p stream -- as well as aspect ratio flags etc -- are preserved during the "capture"...really "transfer" is a better word. (With the pull-down, four 24p frames become five 60i frames; the "A Frame flag" tells a NLE that a particular frame is the first frame in the four-to-five group). If you have a 24p-aware NLE (as the current versions of most software are), it will remove the pull-down.

I understand your concern about the tape mechanism and head wear. If you go through a lot of tape, it increases the chance of troubles. But if you only shoot an hour of tape every couple weeks or so, it isn't that big a deal. The heads and transport ought to be good for hundreds of hours, with proper care. Even so, if you don't mind the guaranteed expense of a second camera vs the small chance of XL2 trouble, that's hard to argue against.

I can also confirm that using a cheaper camera to throw the 24p footage shot on the XL2 into your computer as well as burning back to tape is no problem. I've been using a cheap $200.00 Samsung Mini DV camera myself with no problems. I don't notice any differance in quality, etc...

Joe

thanks guys
 

and thanks for the technical details, I do appreciate it (I never knew that about the A frame flags). I think I'm going to go ahead and get a sidearm camera then. It'll also be nice to have something really portable (for location scouting and stuff).

Cheers :)