so, i got curious about using the XL2 and recording direct to disk with a laptop in the field.

here's what i found

the XL2 actually streams to the firewire port regardless of the state of the tape transport, so at a bare minimum, I can stream to my Powerbook's disk while i'm changing tapes

BUT, i hooked up a fast FW400 disk, plugged the camera into the disk, and started up iMovie, and VOILA! it works...i'm observing it now, but it appears that it's stable. it's been running for 20+ minutes and imovie hasn't complained yet. the .DV file to which it's writing is 6GB+, so clearly iMovie doesn't even care about 32bit+ file sizes anymore! :)

so at best, i can still record to tape as a backup, but maybe i can save the tapes as a backup and just use the disk.

hmm...