When I borrow a what I guess is a PRO or at least semi-pro camera such as a Sony HVR-Z1U from my towns PEG tv studio to capture some lecture or whatever in the region, I'm always stuck with the tape changes at about an hour.
Some of the NEWER Sony cameras in this class now have a FLASH based "hard drive" but since they are formatted with dumb old FAT or possibly FAT32, they chop the resulting file into many sequential pieces that ultimately have to be put together. I don't know what video file format Sony uses or if it is yet another new one everyone has to now suffer.
This is also available as a separate Sony product for about $800, but since the local cable studio folks are not planning to buy any yet, and the only hard drive(s) they have as external firewire fed devices for the cameras were VERY expensive and are reserved for official town hall events, I'm looking for a suitable solution that should be laptop based.
The cameras spews it out continuously on its firewire port, and my laptop has a firewire input, but even if it didn't, they are readily available on a PCMCIA card format.
I'm looking for FREE or very affordable windows software package that captures for however long the shoot is, and produces a NO LOSS recording that then should be easy to input to any standard low or high end editing software package.
I see no need for fragmented little files. A 500 Gigabyte drive these days is near $100 at 5400 RPM and about $140 at 7200 RPM, and formatted NTFS I can make as large a file as I wish. I could use spare space on my C: drive, or could partition it and have a C: drive and a separate data only drive. Ive been meaning to stick a larger drive in my laptop, and this is a great reason to do that!
I was once told by a PRO that there was some hacks that involved VLC that he thought might just work, but I never got any details.
Anyone know of such software? What would be the optimum video file type to be easily usable by PC and MAC editors, and yet lose NO quality at all?
Ideally, perhaps this very same software could also play BACK out the firewire port in some suitable way and one could then make "copy tapes" with just the tape drive in the original camera. Again this process should be LOSSLESS (- missing a frame or few at startups isn't an issue). I can easily make copy tapes camera to camera when I can borrow two cameras, but that isn't always possible, and signing up to use a "TAPE DECK" in an editing room at the studio means getting in line and waiting.
I'm trying to relegate the damned mini-DV tapes to a role as emergency backup, and do continuous recording using a fairly vanilla laptop in a way that then makes sharing and using trivial.
PEGMedia.org now expects finished MPEG2 videos for distribution to other PEG stations, but raw camera footage might well be desirably shared by various local stations all eager to do their OWN version of perhaps one of the Governor's relatively few and scattered "town-hall" events that each actually covers many adjacent towns and could have cameras from several all shooting and interested in sharing, or for any other similar situation.
Rather than edit at all initially, you go home and FTP your raw footage up and everyone else does the same and then you all download whatever you want. Ideally everyone is getting line or mic level audio off the main board, and some may be on cables and some may a use a wireless link, but having common audio makes using whatever pieces one wants from whichever town's cameras an easy process.
Anyway, at least, how do I make my windows laptop a firewire connects "hard drive" for a camera?
