Comments

farss wrote on 4/7/2009, 5:43 PM
I've used one, works as advertised.

Cons:
It's a bit expensive for what it is.
The controls are diabolically difficult to use.
The LCD display is so tiny it's a nightmare for an old fart like me to read.
It connects via 4 pin firewire. This is a problem with any such unit. Buy the expensive Sony cables or use the one that comes with the unit.


Pros:

It works, we've tried a few such units that don't.
You can mount it on top of a camera as it's small and light unless you power it with the bigger battery which it doesn't need.
With cameras such as the the V1 you get status display in the camera's LCD.

Would I recommend it over tape?

When I needed to record a long concert that ran over 1 hour with no break and with no second camera, yes.

Aside from that kind of scenario, no.

Since using the unit once in that scenario I bought a M15P VCR and recorded from the camera to a large format tape which gave me 4.5 hours on the one tape. Not as convenient and more bulky but it solved a problem using the DR60 and Vegas, backup!

When you use Vegas to ingest the files from the DR60 you can get one very big HDV file. OK, that's good and it works perfectly except that file can be too big to backup to optical media. You can backup the 4GB files directly from the DR60 but you need all the files in the right directory structure or Vegas cannot stitch the files together without dropping frames and/or audio at the join. You might be able to solve this with 3rd party tools, don't know for sure.

If you don't face that scenario then the DR60 may be exactly what you need. Just factor in time to download from it and consider the backup issues.

Bob.
DSCalef wrote on 4/7/2009, 9:29 PM
To add to Bob's comments that I essentially agree with:

We used it to record hour plus interviews on the main Z1u camera on the subject. It was essentially a head shot. The camera was unmanned with a Grizzley Pro remote control for zoom, pan and tilt.

The beauty of the DR60 was we had a fast turn around for a one hour edited show from two one hour camera tapes. The ingest speed of the DR60 was tremendous compared to the tape(s) from the 2nd camera. We also recorded on the camera's tape deck as well as backup and archival.

I located the DR60 at my camera 2 position on the end of a 25 foot firewire cable from camera 1. By the time I finished all the interviews over several months, I now get real nervous NOT using the DR60 on a camera almost as a safety.

Once I mastered the operation of the DR60, it never gave me an ounce of trouble or heartburn. It was a re-assurance to me that it was there. Particularly when the interview dragged on to 90 minutes. I could change the camera 2 tape easily but couldn't get to camera 1.

Smart thing we did was run interviewee sound to left channel on both cameras and reporters on right channel to both. Duplicate sound covers a lot of problems. I now own a Zoom H4n to carry that even further.

David
www.NewsVideoTeam.com
VideJoe wrote on 4/9/2009, 2:15 AM
It's way way overprised for this iPod like device as everything else from Sony (accessories that is).