hi guys,
outsmarted myself, brand new xl2, can't afford the deck yet, so i bought a canon (matching manufacturers didn't help) zr200 for $300+ thinking it could pass along the 1's and 0's without too much hickup, and the bonus was it has analog passthrough so i could also monitor on my PVM... WRONG!

well, the PVM monitoring worked well and a one hour MQ had zero video dropouts and only four-thousand one-hundred seventyeight audio dropouts - *&^%&$%&^%

i recaptured with the XL2, as much as that hurt me to do that to the heads... not one dropout to FCP5!

so, any ideas, or do i have to save more marbles for the DSR11... thanks in advance - Lonnie

p.s. for you MOS guys - this was a perfect workaround!

but we use a Canon ZR50MC as a deck when we are on shoots. We capture to premiere and don't get any *noticeable* dropouts or lost frames. though that is ONLY with 4:3 60i footage - anything else it can't handle right. using the S-Video out we can view on our monitor, but we lose audio on preiveiws.

A better solution, caputre to disk with something like DV rack if you already have a windows laptop.

but best advice - buy a deck. - just a note on the DSR-11 it likes Sony tapes (they have a liquid lubricant on them where as Panasonic and such tapes use a dry lubricant and switch back and forth mucks up the heads of your XL2) and you should use only ONE brand of tape stock in both. do a search for tape stock here in the watchdog forums.

Cheers

all comments are my opinion and not nessacaily reflect those of anyone else.

I have a Canon XL2 to shoot with and a Canon ZR200 I use almost exclusively as a deck and have never had a drop out.

Was your ZR200 new? Did you try cleaning the heads?

I use a ZR 80 to capture, yo ucan capture 16:9, all that. Any cam should transfer the info. It's only 1's and 0's, right?

Folks, this is an ongoing issue with Canon cameras. Some of them have a little bit of mis-alignment which means they'll play back fine using the XL-2 but not with other decks. I have this exact problem with one of my XL-2 cameras but not with the other. It's a hit or miss problem so one person may be able to use the $200 cheapo cam for capture, while others may not.

You can always send the camera to Canon to get it aligned so that other decks are compatible. Just be sure to archive any tapes you've already shot because they won't playback once the camera is back in your hands.

-gb-