Lees expensive way that buying a Sony DSR-20?

[John Adolfi]

It looks like a used deck goes for around $1500-$2000. Is there a better, cheaper way to accomplish editing without burning out your camera motor? How about transfering the takes in your bin to the hard drive instead of an alias put the clips on the harddrive? I have 250 gigs devoted just to final cut. What are your thoughts?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

If I could get a DSR-20 for the equivalent of £750, I'd have a DSR-20. The DSR-45 is much better equipped, but much more expensive. The DSR-11 is cheaper, and the standard NLE feeder. JVC have a miniDV deck, but I've never had a lot of luck with JVC gear.

 

Frankly it's a good price; until recently, DSR-11s were that much new. You'll like the convenience.

 

Phil

[Sam Javor]

Depending on the ammount of clips 250gig might do it... my first DV feature which is almost done I think is around 500gig in raw footage... including backups and work files I think we're around 1.5TB... of course we've had 3 drives suffer head crashes... next time I'll probably use a low density SCSI raid array instead of high density ATA drives and backup on tape...but we also recorded direct to disk so there was no tape in the recording process.

[Michael Collier]

If your just looking to feed DV into your NLE and back out, I have always recomended a $300 mini dv consumer camera. The best part about miniDV is its all digital. A cheap camera is as good as a 2k deck (although you dont get the analog setup options or outputs.) but if your final format is mostly miniDV you can save yourself thousands of dollars and you wont loose any quality. If you need to put it to another format occasionally, you can pay a production house, or become friends with a few photogs at your local TV station, they may let you make free dubs to beta or VHS using quality gear