I'm considering getting a Z5U/MRC1K for our church. We want to be able to record HDV to tape and DV widescreen to the CF card. As soon as a Sunday service is over, we want to be as efficient as possible in computer capture, editing and uploading to the web--and for that purpose the SD widescreen resolution is sufficient.

Is it possible to select DV widescreen as the recording format for the MRC1 or is it standard 4:3? The Z5U brochure says something about letterbox not being available through iLINK and I wondered if this restricts what can be written to the CF card.

You don't want letterbox, I don't think -- you want SQUEEZE, which you can easily set in i.link Downconvert on the cam. That should give you what you need. Your NLE will (should) see the flag and expand to DV widescreen when you edit and/or encode if you use a DV Widescreen preset.

Letterbox would give you a 4:3 frame with the bars above and below your 16:9 picture, reducing your DV resolution to about 360 lines. But yes, you're correct that the LETTER BOX function on the Z5 only applies to the analog outs. This is true of all of Sony's current offerings, cams and decks. The only device they ever made that could do letterbox out of FW was the Z1 as far as I know.

But I'm curious as to why you think DV rather than HDV on the card will make anything quicker or easier. File sizes, transfer times and editing times will all be the same unless your PC just can't handle HDV.

Thanks for the info Adam.

For those times when we want to quickly post a web-compressed version of the Sunday service, I think it would be quicker to encode to wmv from DV as compared to HDV. At least that's been my experience with Vegas Pro 9.

Okay, if you say so -- I don't know Vegas so I suppose that's possible.

At any rate, your Z5/MRC combo should work just fine.

Mark,

I work with pro 9 as my primary editor, also use edius. I shoot church events too. I am not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying render times are to long? Or are you saying the time to down load on line is longer because hd is 4 times the data?? I do not post anything on line anymore that is not hd and mp4. I do use a quad i7 however. Quality Sd cameras still make fine footage, but why shoot hd then?

trying to understand.

I've done it with my Z7, record HDV to tape & then DV to card. When I know I'm exporting to lower than SD resolution for a long video (60min +), I didn't see the point with messing with the HD software down conversion.

Yes, DV will encode faster than HDV, how much depends on your computer / software.

You can also down convert out of the firewire port even w/o the MRC-1. When I've done this with FCP, FCP sees the camera as DV instead of HDV.

Dale, I'm saying that rendering to wmv or flash is quicker coming from DV compared to HDV.