VTR Deck Recommendations

[Richard Martz]

There is a much simpler and cheaper solution to the problem. Use an inexpensive audio board to feed your speakers. You can still use firewire to connect your deck to your computer for audio and video capture connections. Instead of feeding the audio signal directly from your computer to your speakers, go directly to the audio board and then to the speakers. So now you will be coming out of the computer and going to the audio board and then to your speakers (if you are using powered speakers). Now use the audio from the audio/video connectors on the deck and connect that to two additional channels on the board. When you are capturing raise the faders on these channels and you should have audio from the deck playing through your speakers. Mackie, Behringer as well as other manufacturers make excellent small boards that will work well for this purpose. You can frequently score some of these boards cheaply on eBay as well.

Another option is to use a splitter on the speakers and connect that to your deck and to your computer. But you will not have any control over the volume of the signal coming from the deck.

Richard Martz
MagicMartz Media

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Richard Martz] “Use an inexpensive audio board to feed your speakers.”

This does work, but note that the audio will be several seconds out of sync with the video when logging / capturing HDV material via Firewire. This is the nature of HDV and the conversion process that it goes through to be captured.

The actual captures will be perfectly fine, it’s just annoying with the audio being out of sync while you’re trying to watch the video playback. We own two M15U’s but we convert all material to DVCPro HD or now ProRes for capture. We don’t edit in HDV. Then there’s no problem monitoring audio during Log and Capture.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
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[Richard Martz]

Yes Walter you are right. That delay is pretty annoying. But I just got tired of having heaphones on my head when capturing HDV.

Richard Martz
MagicMartz Media

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[Walter Biscardi]

One other way around the audio delay is to simply Log the footage as DV and then switch over to HDV for the actual capture. You can listen to DV audio in realtime and when you set up to Batch Capture, simply switch the format to HDV if that’s what you want to capture. I personally can’t stand HDV, but I know a lot of people cut to it.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Bob Flood]

Hi

“I personally can’t stand HDV” jeez walter, its always about you huh 🙂

but seriously. I relaize the thread is more about sound previewing, but if i had my druthers, id ruther have the 1500. its the same transport as the pro dvcam machine, so logging, capturing, and digitizing is gonna be tons faster, especially if you are cpturing to a different format, such as dvcprohd, and controlling the machine via rs422 9 pin

we have the m10u and its a boat anchor its so slow.

my 2.2 cents

bee eph