[Bruce Barker]

A little addendum to this thread, many years after the fact. 🙂 Unless I’m completely misunderstanding the question, the HVX200 actually DOES have A/V inputs. You can’t use the XLR audio connectors; you must instead use the RCA jacks for both video and audio. These jacks are even labeled “in/out”, which helps provide a clue as to this particular capability.

Set the camera to Tape mode (recording an A/V signal to P2 cards isn’t allowed), and cycle the Mode button (just under the Scene File dial) to MCR-VCR. The HVX200 now “sees” whatever video and audio are being fed into the RCA A/V inputs. Now just make sure you have a tape in the drive, and using the camera’s remote control–yes, the remote–hit Play and Record simultaneously. The HVX200 is now recording the source.

You can’t control the audio input levels; whatever the camera receives is what it records. I believe a variation of this setup also allows pass-through to the HVX200’s FireWire cable as well, although I’ve not tried it.

Hope that helps!

[Bruce Barker]

It’s a ridiculously old post, but in case somebody’s still chasing this type of problem: no matter what I did on my FCP 7, I could only get that “single frame” output via Firewire whenever the play head was stopped. Went through all Rob’s excellent suggestions about a million times, plus tried some ridiculous this-can’t-work settings just for experimentation. No full-motion video no matter what, until… I UNCHECKED the “Mirror On Desktop” box. This stops the video on the Canvas, but sends full-motion video to the outboard gear! And it also keeps working, even is your Canvas isn’t placed properly (behind something else, for instance). Who knew?

I won’t begin to guess why this worked (almost seems like the Mac was being forced to choose between two mismatched video outputs, but again, I check everything), but give it a shot if all else fails.

Running FCP 7 on a quad-core Intel Mac Pro, Firewire output to either an ADS Pyro A/V Link or a Sony HDV deck (only one connected at a time, per Rob’s instruction). Yay!

[Bruce Barker]

Hi Mark–
Good news: it’s repairable, and not a horribly expensive fix either. The explanation I got was that after about the first year of HVX200 production, Panasonic began outsourcing the rubber menu selector buttons (it’s all one piece) to another manufacturer. That rubber degrades and leaches a chemical that causes poor connections in a couple nearby ribbon connectors. It’s especially a problem for cameras whose tape drives don’t get used, as regular exposure to air (opening the tape door) helps alleviate the buildup of crud. Strange but true.

The fella who fixed mine did a top-notch job and I got it back same-day… but then I do have the good fortune to live close by. He’s a Panasonic tech, so he knows these cameras inside and out. When I was at their office, they were FedEx’ing a couple repaired HVX200’s out to a New York City TV station, so they do some biz with bigger accounts as well as us indie guys. Here’s his company site:

https://studiocityengineering.com/

I’d have to check the records to see what the repair cost was exactly, but it was something like $200 bucks. Half the cost of having Panasonic do it at one of their repair shops, I’m told, and it’s apparently the exact same repair.

Good luck!

BRUCE

[Bruce Barker]

Wow, J.C., I couldn’t believe it when I saw your post (lo these many years later). My HVX200 is doing the exact same thing, only it slowly zooms all the way out. No remotes, no external controllers, tested in multiple environments (so it can’t be some screwy issue where it’s interpreting some other input through its remote sensor).

I can override it by leaning on the zoom controller, which is exhausting after a few minutes. Oddly, this same issue seems to have disabled the handle zoom completely, no matter how it’s set up in the menu. Dang!