You can take a lot of great stills on a 4 or 8 gig card. It would be nice to have a timer hooked up to the snapshot button. I haven't found anything to take intervals onto tape.

I got mine yesterday and I have to say this is without doubt the single best accessory one can get for their tape based camera, especially XHA1.

On playing around I noticed if you play back a HDV recorded piece of footage in the camera and hit record on the HVR unit, it actually down converts the footage to SD before recording it as an avi. Thats interesting I thought. On a quick look at the original HDV clip and then the downconverted one, it seems to do a pretty good job too! And this wasn't even recorded with the raw avi filetype which could potentially do it even better.

I wonder could this be an unexpected perk?

Hi Ger. So can you please confirm that 25F recording works OK? Specs and brochures don't always tell the whole story so it would be great to hear from somebody who has actually tried it.

Richard

Hi Richard, I just tested with PP CS3 on PC.
In HDV mode on the A1 it records in .m2t both 50i and 25f.
These files import and work as they should.
In SD mode, again, both 25f and 50i work perfectly and are a standard .avi file.

The unit automatically detects whatever mode the camera is in.

As already mentioned there is also a RAW .avi file recording which I haven't yet tested as I simply don't need it at the moment. My take on RAW would be that like stills from a DSLR, one would only need RAW if multiple savings of files were needed to be done. eg. a colour correction and masking applied to a shot and made into another uncompressed clip, which again needed to be imported back into another timeline and processed again and so on.

Thanks Ger, appreciate you taking the trouble to confirm this. Now I just need to find somewhere in Singapore that sells this recorder, but that's another problem! :)

Richard

Ger,

Have you tried shooting in HDV on the Canon xh A1 and setting the output to downconvert and recording a SD signal on the CF card. The idea of the 2 formats at the same time maybe useful for some applications instead of downconverting from the HDV tape later.

Bob

........disregard.......

Answer to my own question - No. And to Bobs question, No.

My cam was doing the downconverting and the unit was reading the signal as a dv signal going into it.

Basically whatever signal the camera is feeding is the signal the unit records in.

We cannot have simultaneous recording of HDV to tape and SD to card.

I've read through this thread - just not clear on 2 issues (seems like I have seen different responses):

Battery - what specifically do you need to get to power this unit ?

Continuous recording during tape change - can that be done without dropped frames ?

thanks

To answer your first question you can use any L-series sony battery or a compatible off-brand. I purchased a cheap one and charger from China and it's run great with it.

Don't know the answer to your second as I haven't put a tape in my machine since getting the unit. Hopefully someone else as insight on this.

Just wanted to verify, but when you velcro'd the MRC1 to the back of the A1, did you just apply velcro to the battery pack door and then to the side of the MRC1?

This is a clever unit in the area of tape change.
When the tape runs out the unit continues to record.
When you make the tape change and press the REC button the new tape begins to record and the unit remains recording.
The next time the rec button is pressed ( to stop recording ) they both stop as usual.

Im not sure if it works the same but opposite for when the card fills.

do you miss any frames or add any audio sync issues during this process? I thought for some reason I read in the A1 manual that when you change tapes, the firewire out misses a few frames (maybe when the record engages). of course this is much better than missing 30-45 seconds of a tape change but just curious

Image quality improvement with MRC1 tapeless recorder
 

With the tapeless recorder (MRC1)-Has anyone seen an improvment in the A1 when there is movement in the frame or large amounts of detail? As many others have said in other threads-quick movements in the frame are blurry and scenes with lots of detail look compressed and not as sharp. Understanding this is a work around many face with the compressed hdv format. I am looking to purchase the recorder to get around this problem.
Anyone who has seen improvement on this particular issue I'd love to hear comments.

Jason Weisner
Canon XHA1
Premiere Pro 2 |Cineform Aspect HD

I have only heard great things about the quality of the video image of the A1- so I am surprised at this question. Is this really an issue with the A1 ? I am on the verge of getting the A1s - but this is of some concern.

As far as quality of tape vs quality of the MRC1 - I would think (guess) it should be exactly the same - both are M2t files I believe (same codec, and digital data (0's + 1's) are 0's and 1's ). I could be wrong, and I look forward to responses from actual users (which I hope to be one soon).

For me, the idea of the MRC1 is workflow - dump the MC file to a disk and start editing. Plus you have the tape backup for archive if you need. Kind of like the Pana HVC-150 but with tape capabilities - of course, mpeg2 instead of mpeg4.