OT: HDV hard disk recorder

[John Rofrano]

I have the Sony HVR-DR60 60GB Hard Disk Recorder which I use with my Sony HVR-Z1U and I love it. I paid $1,400 for it back in 2007 so at the $789.00 B&H price it’s a steal. You will like it even better because it’s designed for the V1. I can’t use a LANC with it without having a tape in the transport of my Z1 but I believe that you can with the V1.

Once you shoot with the HVR-DR60 and come back and drop the files onto your hard drive and start editing, you’ll wonder how you ever survived sitting their capturing tape after tape for hours. It is an incredible workflow improvement.

I read up on a lot of the other hard disk units before I bought the DR60 and they all have their share of problems. That’s why I paid more for the Sony. It has operated flawlessly over the past few years and I can highly recommend it.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Stephen Mann]

John, I use my DR60’s on my Z1’s all the time now – without tape. Just start/stop the record from the DR60 and don’t touch the red button on your LANC controller or camera. (And ignore the blinking tape warning).

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[John Rofrano]

…don’t touch the red button on your LANC controller or camera.

Yes, which is why I said it doesn’t work with a LANC. Having a remote control button that you can’t push isn’t much of a remote control now is it. 😉 (but I get the point, you can still use zoom and focus, just not start/stop). Thanks.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Gerald Rightmyer]

I have the same camera and just bought the same hard drive unit that the original poster is asking about. I am using a windows 7 64-bit system and the hard drive which connects by firewire is not recognized by my computer. I hooked the unit up to a different computer on my home network that uses windows XP then transferred the video data over the network by using Sony Vegas pro 9’s hard drive import feature. This worked but then for some reason these files were choking vegas 9 and leading to system crashes. I tried using the 32 bit version of vegas 9 on my computer with the same problems, so I don’t know if I am going to be able to use my hard drive. I have had no problems when capturing the video into vegas via tape with the camera connected directly to my computer.

[Gerald Rightmyer]

If anyone wants to know today I was able to transfer my footage to a windows xp computer on my home network using sony’s utility program and then I transferred the files over my home network to my windows 7 64 bit computer and the files worked fine in sony vegas pro 9 64 bit.

[Stephen Mann]

Are you using the Recording Unit software that Sony provides for the HVR-DR60?

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Gerald Rightmyer]

Yes, but I cannot import files directly into my windows 7 machine because the hard drive which is fat32 via firwire is not recognized by windows 7. Therefore the software provided by sony cannot detect it either. As I said I did work around this by importing the files into another computer on my home network that uses windows XP. I doubt any support for this sony hard drive will be forth coming for windows 7 computers.

[John Rofrano]

I doubt any support for this sony hard drive will be forth coming for windows 7 computers.

No support is needed. My DR60 works fine in Windows 7. I’m not sure why your PC cannot see it. I’m running Windows 7 64-bit and I just plug it in and it’s recognized. Try a different firewire port or different cable. It should work.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Gerald Rightmyer]

I found that I didn’t have the firewire cable fully pushed in and was able to get the hard drive unit recognized by windows 7 but neither sony vegas nor the utility provided by sony would tranfer the files without stopping and getting an error message. I therefore hooked the unit into another windows xp computer on my home network and transferred the files using sony’s utility for file transfer with no problems. I have a dell windows 7 64 bit computer with an icore 7 processor. I’m wondering if the processor is in some way incompatible with this unit. What type processor is on your computer John?

[Jim Mickol]

We have three DR60s and I have a new HP Pavilion DV7 laptop running Windows 7 (64 bit) and my DR60s are having major problems. They work fine on our Windows XP (32bit) systems. The DR60 has its red light on solid and won’t shut off unless you remove power. I have a trouble ticket into Sony about this (weeks ago).