[Editorial Comment: The following tip from John
Beale is designed to work with HDV cameras, such as the
Sony Z1U or the JVC DY-100U, that use an MPEG-2 codec
to record.]
The
built-in tape drive on [an HDV] camera is convenient,
but it occasionally has drop-outs (see also Sony's
statement on dropouts.) Since [Sony's] HDV records
in blocks of 0.5 second, a dropout gives you half a second
of black video and muted audio. I consider this unacceptable
in a professional environment. You can avoid tape drop
outs by recording the HDV signal via firewire to an external
hard disk drive. There are dedicated hard drives for the
purpose, although currently most record only plain DV,
and would require at least a firmware upgrade to accomodate
HDV.
You
can also use a laptop or notebook PC with built-in or
external USB2 or firewire drive. I know Vegas 6 and DV-Rack
with the HDV add-on can record HDV, but there is a simpler
alternative: a freely downloadable program called CAPDVHS
(thanks John Jay at DVInfo
for pointing this out.) CapDVHS was designed for D-VHS
decks but it can capture MPEG-2 from any firewire source,
including for example HDV cameras. It requires Windows
XP. It works fine on my Dell Inspiron 9300, but does not
work on my desktop WinXP box for unknown reasons (says
"Error 80040217: Cannot connect SampleGrabber").
