thanks for the lead, will check it out.
Would still like to hear from someone who has seen this work in person or knows explicitly why it won't.
Hey dude. thought maybe I could shed some light on this as a user of the DN60 with VX1000. I did a post on Insta (bottom of this post) about it a couple weeks ago and so I've taken a lot from what I wrote on there as its basically the same info.
I’ve had a ton of tapedeck/timecode issues with pretty much all of my VX's for the past year or two so I bit the bullet and bought one of the DN60 capture devices as I was spending a lot of money on repairs. I was considering buying it for a while before but I didn't like the idea of having the device mounted on either the top or the bottom of the camera as I thought it’d get in the way when filming low or using an on-camera light. But with all the tapedeck issues I though it might be an idea worth revisiting if I could find a bracket mount to hold it on the side of the camera without getting in the way of any buttons.
After a few experiments this is what I now use:
A Dn60 mounted on the side of the VX1000 with an L bracket and a 30cm FireWire cable connecting the two.
The device captures to CF cards so you don’t need tapes (a 16GB CF card records 1hr 7mins footage), and takes x4 AA batteries (a freshly charged set last about 3-4hours) so it doesn’t use or run down the VX batteries. In fact, the VX batteries actually last longer as the tape-deck isn’t being used at all.
You capture the footage from the device via firewire in the same way you would do off a cap cam, but using the capture controls in Premiere/Final Cut, etc, and the footage is exactly the same and doesn’t glitch at all. Occasionally the device will lag while capturing and drop capture frames (which you can notice through a break in the audio), but rewinding and recapturing the clip will almost always fix it. The DN60 creates it's own timecode and records exactly what would be getting recorded onto tape and it never seems to drop any frames while recording VX input.
The ergonomics and weighting of the camera with the DN60 rig is pretty much the same a normal vx, with the only major differences being it being a tiny bit heavier that the record button is on the DN60 device - so you have to keep an eye on that to ensure a timecode is being recorded, but a red light comes on when it is recording. The firewire is the perfect length so it's super study and never comes out.
I’ve been using this set up for the past month or so to film our next video and not had any problems as of yet. The only issue I had was using the DN60 with one of my VX's but that was because it had a faulty firewire port.
Here's an example of some offcut footage to show it's identical to tape:
I'm sure I’m not the first to do this, but I’ve not seen another VX with DN60 side mounted before yet, which to me seems like the most logical placement for it.
I also know this might get mixed reviews from a lot of VX people, but honestly I think it could be a viable way to keep VX footage going, and honestly it feels pretty good knowing the footage isn’t going to be glitched when you come to capture it. It's a shame not to have the physical archive of tapes, but as long as you back up to drives/cloud storage you always have it archived.
I’ll be shooting our next video with this setup and I'll be posting updates about it all via this insta feed, so check it out for updates:
https://www.instagram.com/orwellian.world.landscape/Hope that helps anyone considering this as an option. If anyone has any questions feel free to hit me up on here, or you can DM me on the Insta accounts above. Cheers!
Topic: anybody successfully mod a vx to record to a medium other than mini dv tape? (Read 1722 times)