I hope this is the right forum for this question, since it is specifically for the playback of tapes that will be recorded at 1080/60i with the XL H1. I'm looking at the Sony HVRM 25U for a playback deck, and would like to know if this deck would indeed play back these tapes. It doesn't have SDI output, which leads into my next question, can anyone recommend a deck under 10K that would play this tape and have an SDI option. Thanks for any help in advance, because the HD stuff is somewhat confusing for me.

Don,

It may be just me but I think that SDI out is something you only care about at time of capture (ie record to SDI out from cam). Once it's on tape... it's already compressed and can't be uncompressed.

Also I'm pretty sure all decks will support 1080/60i, there just isn't any to support 24f.

I stand to be corrected on both points.

Don't know about the SDI option but I believe 1080/60i will play on most if not all HDV decks.

Don,

It may be just me but I think that SDI out is something you only care about at time of capture (ie record to SDI out from cam). Once it's on tape... it's already compressed and can't be uncompressed.

Also I'm pretty sure all decks will support 1080/60i, there just isn't any to support 24f.

I stand to be corrected on both points.

SDI can be useful even if you are playing back from tape depending on how you want to send your signal. Yes the tape is a compressed signal but the SDI out might be a better signal path than other outputs.

You are correct that 1080/60i is the compatible signal for playing HDV back on Sony decks.

Has anyone mastered an XL H1 1080/60i source tape to another larger format tape such as HDCAM using SDI to SDI, pros or cons, or even if this would be practical for a working copy and saving your H1 source tape?? Final editing would be from a combination of both HDCAM and XL H1 sources.

Has anyone mastered an XL H1 1080/60i source tape to another larger format tape such as HDCAM using SDI to SDI.

Once the uncompressed H1 video signal is captured on its internal
tape recorder as a heavily compressed HDV mpeg stream,
all the extra information has been lost forever and cannot be restored.

What some people are doing is to convert from HDV
to uncompressed. That 'frees' the 'blocks' of pixels
up again for compositing and enables faster frame
accurate editing.

However, to truly make use
of the H1's HDSDI port you need either a VTR that can record
(at the time of acquistion) a higher bit rate than HDV's 19 mbps or a computer that samples at a higher bit rate (or better codec) than HDV.

Some reasons to convert from HDV to HDCAM:
1) The Venue uses HDCAM for playback/presentation
2) That is the video format the editing suite wants.
3) You want to the perception to be that it was shot on a high end Sony F900.

Use an AJA converter to trancode the component signal to SDI. This can be useful for routing.

Thanks to all who replied to my questions. This helped me to better think out some hardware issues, like selecting the right deck. If anyone has anymore insite, please feel free to add to, or expand on what has already been said.