I haven't captured to a laptop, but it is indeed pretty simple. In fact you don't even need to put a tape in the camera, if you don't want to. The 'no tape' icon appears flashing in the LCD the whole time, but you don't need to have a tape in. You don't actually even use the Record button on the camera to record--you simply hit the Capture button in the Vegas capture utility.

But I can't imagine that recording to a laptop would be any different, although I have wondered if an external hard drive (7200 RPM) would work well for this purpose? The particular one I have is firewire 400, but I could get a USB 2.0 drive as well.

Do you use an external HD Jeremy, or do you record to a hard drive in your laptop?

TB

Recording to a laptop is straightforward. However, it's usually not recommended that you record to the internal drive. High capacity 2.5 inch external drives abound, can be taped to the laptop as necessary and powered from the USB port.

Biggest concern is to secure the firewire connection into the laptop and to the camera. 4-wire FW is notoriously subject to popping out at inopportune moments.

Be aware that monitoring via Vegas will give you a somewhat darker preview window than the captured image.

As far as not putting a tape in the camcorder ... be aware that for some unearthly and inconceivable reason, many consumer-grade camcorders disable the microphone if there is no tape inserted. All of the camcorders i've owned passed no audio signal until a tape was inserted. And, if there's a tape inserted, the camera will auto-shut-off after 4 minutes unless the camcorder is actually recording to the tape. It's a major pain.

> Do you use an external HD Jeremy, or do you record to a hard drive in your laptop?

Hey Tom, I'm not Jeremy but I have the same workflow. I use my laptop to capture using HDV Rack to an external firewire drive. Then I just connect to external drive to my desktop and transfer the files. I bought a PCMCIA firewire card that has 3 ports and I use one for the camera and one for the external hard drive leaving one open.

Have any of you guys/gals tried the new NetBooks? I just got my kids a Lenovo S10 and for $399 you get an 80GB hard drive and Win XP. I paid $1500 for my Sony HVR-60 hard drive recorder and that was only 60GB! These things are so small and the 10" screen should be perfect for monitoring. I'm thinking of getting one for myself to use for capture because they are so small & portable you can probably attach them to your tripod with an arm.

~jr

I have done it both ways- firewire 400 for a longer project and straight to the internal hard drive for this last project I mentioned above.

I've had no problems either way. The laptop I have I got on the cheap 350USD (www.dealnews.com)- it is a dual core pentium with 160gb of hdd space and 1.5gbs of RAM.

Edit: link.

j razz

>Recording to a laptop is straightforward. However, it's usually not recommended that you record to the internal drive.

Why? I work with standards laptops since 6 years and never had any problem. I use Scenalyser (wich is a magnitude better than Vegas for this duty) each week for live capture of zillions of short clips to 2 hours long events and it works beautifully.

BTW, the little Atom laptops (Acer, IdeaPad S Series, etc....) don't have firewire ports, so you will have to add a card to capture...

I second the comment about unsecure Firewire connectors. I would love myself a custom locking connector.

That Lenovo S10 looks absolutely brilliant. I have an ancient, tiny Fujitsu that is woefully underpowered, but is a really small form factor. It can just barely play a DVD. These look like they would be perfect.

And why the heck would anyone pay $1,500 for a disk drive? Oh, sorry, I know you did it, and I actually do understand, but wow is that ever overpriced. Take an $80 drive, add $0.50 worth of electronics and charge 20X the original price. I've actually thought about making a circuit that would adapt any Firewire drive to a camcorder. There isn't much going on, although I guess if you want a fancy display and keypad that gets more complicated.

> And why the heck would anyone pay $1,500 for a disk drive? Oh, sorry, I know you did it, and I actually do understand, but wow is that ever overpriced.

LOL, yea I asked myself the same thing but the Firestores were having all sorts of problems with corrupt HD files at the time and I didn't want to chance it. I often record performances that are over an hour long and findning a good point to swap tapes was a drag. Having 4 hrs record time sitting on the top of my Z1 just seemed too good to pass up. It also uses the same Sony camera batteries as my Z1 so there were a lot of determining factors in my selection.

After the first shoot, instead of coming back and sitting through hours of tape capture I copied the files onto my hard drive in a bout 12 minutes and was ready to edit. It was well worth it but I agree that, in general, videographers are being raped by equipment manufactures. I mean how many times have you seen a tiny aluminum bracket that should cost $10-$20 go for $80. It's outrageous, I agree.

~jr

Wow, the Lenovo looks like a sweet little unit...

I too was strongly considering the little Sony external HD recorder for the FX1, but abandoned the idea thanks to reviewing several threads on this forum. I'll just use a laptop and external HD--TigerDirect has 500GB Lacie shock-resistant hard drives for well under $200. You can get them either firewire or USB; I think I'll likely go with USB simply for the reason mentioned above--the problem with the FW400 plug staying in the port.

While we're on the topic of blowing bucks though, I really like the looks of that little Sony video http://www.berger-bros.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=SONGVHD700walkman[/link] unit. I think it would allow me to check the footage I've recorded while still out in the field, and also would be useful to wind/rewind miniDV tapes. You could also use it as a deck to capture the footage later in the studio. And it also uses the same batteries as the FX1.

TB

Great ideas posted here. When capturing to laptop which cables do you use. My cam has an HDMI socket but where do I plug it into or do I capture via USB? While capturing to laptop what format is it capturing to since my cam is an AVCHD model.

> While capturing to laptop what format is it capturing to since my cam is an AVCHD model.

You can't because you camera doesn't support capture because the camera already records to disk. Why would use use a laptop anyway? I plan on purchasing a small AVCHD camera for exactly the reason of NOT having to capture to a laptop or tape.

~jr

The problem is that the preview screen on the cam is too small to see clearly enough. The laptop preview screen is what interested me. After reading some post here that many guys are shooting directly to laptops I thought it was an excellent idea and wanted to do the same.

Do laptops come with an HDMI input socket? If they do then would I be able to capture via this method using Vegas?