Sony DSR-1500A Deck

[Adam Schmidt]

You got it right. Sony will not play Pani over FW, and the reverce is true. Pani is coming out with a DVCPRO deck (it was at nab) in the $5000 range that can play DVcam over FW, it might be better for you. The 1500 is a good DV deck, but I can see the end of DV coming, heck I have not tuched the stuff for over two years now.

adam

[Tim O’grady]

Adam
Thanks for the quick reply, POs are due soon and it sounds like we need to do a little more research. Any word from Panasonic on when that deck would be available?

Tim

[Michael Smith]

seems to be good as a feeder deck only
assemble from FCP not frame accurate
insert not available without special cards

[Aaron Neitz]

Optional Digital Boards? We have the 1500A with the optional SDI I/O board and it will play back DVCPRO-25 just fine from there. (note, the deck won’t playback DVCPRO-50) The deck gets used heavily as a loaded for dailies on DVCAM and has never given us problems. The auto tension warning has saved several tapes by stopping down the deck and refusing to do anything further (you take off the cover and gently extract by hand. tapes were saved)

The only drawback is it MUST be on its own firewire bus, so you’ll have to get a cheap PCI firewire card.

[Sam Zimman]

It will playback DVCPro-25 through SDI, but not through the optional Firewire board. This means you can not edit in native DVCPro-25 codec. So, if you get a lot of DVCPro-25 footage, you should realize that you would have to capture over SDI to Un8, or DV, or DVCPro, or whatever codec you want to get with. You will not get an exact duplication of the data on the tape. It will be decoded, played over SDI, and FCP will encode it to whatever codec you want. This sounds like a lot of room for encoding errors, but it’s no worse than what you do with a Digibeta.

[Tim O’grady]

Thanks for all your input guys!

Tim

[Scott Evans]

1500A plays back DVCPRO 25 just fine through firewire connection.
Cheers!