I am investigating the purchase of a GL2 for our church. We want to use the Firewire socket to record to the hard drive on an Apple eMac with Super Drive. We will then edit and burn a DVD in post-production. Question: Can I get live video data out of the camera Firewire socket without a tape loaded in the GL2? In other words, is Firewire outputting data all the time the camera is on, or just when it's in Record mode?

The reason for this requirement is that we will be recording longer than the tape length will allow at hi-res, and we don't want the camera operator to have to change tapes mid-recording session.

Can't say for Macs, but on my PC with Adobe Premiere, I record what I see in the monitor window whether the cam is in record mode or not and whether a tape is in or not. Make sure you've turned all the power save features off or your camera will get bored with you and shut down.

I wouldn't believe that it would be any different with a Mac, but you never know.

Good luck.

Tom

It should work fine with the Mac as well.

- don

Yes, the cameras will have a permanent output on the firewire.
I use it all the time to do small test. I have a camera hooked up
to my laptop (PC) and capturing with Premiere while doing tests.
This saves my heads on my camera more and tape.

Interesting idea...

How much data (gigabytes) does an hour of recording require?

mk46

UMM around 13 or 14gb i think.


Zac

4.5 minutes per gig or 13-1/3 gigs per hour.