Supercam to DV?
 

Hi,

I have the Panasonic AG DP800H SVHS 'Supercam' from the late 90s.

Now this has a great lens system and image but I would love to be able to record straight to digital video. Is it possible? Can any of the Focus FS recorders take analogue input or would one of the Sony DV Walkman's work? If so which one?

What about the GV-HD700? Would analogue image data from the SVHS be recorded as HD?

Cheers

You might be able to fool it into recording in HDV mode, but if course the picture won't be any better than analog VHS ever. Just as you can pour a gallon of water into a five gallon bucket -- it'll fit, but you won't have any more water (data).

But it's possible the deck will not let you record in HDV mode when it sees an analog SD signal (any signal, really) from the SVid input. The best you could hope for in that case would be SD DV. The manual makes it sound as if that is the case.

Thanks Adam.

I was wanting to take the live feed when the camera is in camera mode sending the image straight out to a DV recorder rather than play back SVHS footage. I've heard this can be done.

You can probably do this but, again, your picture won't likely be any better than VHS no matter what you do.

What exactly is your goal? If you simply want your low-res analog footage to be in a digital format, no problem. But you can never increase the resolution.

Supercam to DV
 

The best you can do with this is to record the S-Video and audio outs to a DV recorder. It will be better than going to SVHS, avoiding the degradation of recording on analog tape, but it will still be an analog signal, with all the associated undesirable artifacts. You would have better results in the all digital realm.

Do you know of any dv recorder that is mobile I can use that accepts S-video?

The HD700 mentioned above does, as does the GV-D1000 for plain old SD DV.