Since you could buy three HV20s for the price of an XHA1, this would be a great camera to use for capturing multiple angles of a shot.

Anyway, what I was wondering was if one remote control could be used to trigger multiple cameras to record simultaneously? That way capturing the footage would make editing much simpler, providing each camera's tape was started from the very beginning.

Yes, No, and maybe.

One remote will work on three cams, and it will trigger them at the same time... PROVIDED they all pick up the ir signal. If you spread the cams out too far away the ir beam will possibly miss one or more of the cams. Not withstanding, the HV20 does not have an ir pickup on the back of the cam... only on the front... so if you are trying to control remotely from the rear, then you have to depend on the ir signal bouncing off walls and/or other objects to get it going... thus complicating the situation even more.

Why they didn't provide ir pick up on the back is beyond me... if you're not going to provide lanc then one would figure the next best thing is a rear ir pick up.

You can always transmit IR signals via optical (audio) cable(s) from great distances, around the corners etc if you wanted to. One can turn a remote control to LANC and much more with ease. I you are willing to run cables from all the camcorders you will have a fool proof multi camera synced setup for almost free. You can even buy all the sockets and stuff to have a modular plug-in system for different situations and cable lengths.

Attaching/aligning such a cable to camcorder`s IR pickup area and to remote`s IR sender is up to ones creativity and DIY skills, just don`t mess your hardware up with hot glue.

Cheers,
T

Yes, I figured they'd need to be facing the one direction. But still, it's a possibility.

Interesting idea about using an optical cable. I guess that would be worth a try.