Brief Scenes

If I can’t afford a Mini DV VCR, would buying a cheap camcorder to spool tapes to a Mac work just as well?

My student film group has a just bought a few Sony DSR-PD 170’s to film with. We know it’s not best for the camera to spool tapes to our computer with it, but Mini DV VCRs are upwards of $2,000. If we bought a $300 Mini DV camcorder to spool tapes instead, would that work out, or would the quality diminish? Thanks!

You should be fine using a low-end consumer camcorder as a “DV deck” as long as you stay with regular DV or DV widescreen when you capture video to the PD170s and use SP tape speed for acquisition at 30fps… The quality should not diminish presuming you are importing the video over firewire. The consumer camcorder’s small lenses & imaging chips and the video acquisition electronics are way different, but the DV-format digital stream leaving the camcorder and going out over firewire to the Mac should not impact the video quality. Once you stray from “default” PD170 settings you could be staring down problems – but you have a built-in fall-back by just using the PD-170s as the deck.

How to Use a Mini DV Camcorder : Troubleshooting Tape Problems for Mini DV Camcorders