Does anyone know ... if you record using the component cables hooked up to a capture card, by-passing the tape, if the signal still has mpeg2 long gop HDV compression? I imagine it still has the color space of 4:2:0, but I think if I were to hook one up to an HD component IN card I could bypass the compression?

A component signal is analog, so there is no compression by definition. The compression you see would depend on the capture card.

Mark

but no, you will not get higher resolution or color sampling by using the compenent output--it's just reading the 4:2:0 signal from the HDV tape.

Does anyone know ... if you record using the component cables hooked up to a capture card, by-passing the tape, if the signal still has mpeg2 long gop HDV compression? I imagine it still has the color space of 4:2:0, but I think if I were to hook one up to an HD component IN card I could bypass the compression?

The Component analog outputs of the HVR-A1U are full 4:4:4 signal. This signal can be captured and sent to an SDI converter and then writted to either HDCAM, or if you wish, you can save it to a high-speed raid drive.

The Viper HD camera system does this right out of the box, but you can buy a new Mercedes or Ferrari for less money.

New Mercedes or Ferrari? That's a huge price difference, haha.

Anyways, could someone explain the whole component input/output, capture card, SDI converter, HDCAM, raid drive thing to a newbie? I don't really understand what any of those are, how they work, or what they do, much less why you would use them.