Heavyweight DVR Repair - DataVideo DN-300

On the lookout for a tapeless recording solution for my HDV cameras I spotted this old DataVideo DN-300 going cheap on eBay.  It was described as having a faulty hard drive so I assumed I would be able to open it up, replace the drive and get the recorder working again.

However when I received it I realised that the DN-300 features a removable hard drive.  Not something that was mentioned in any of the reviews.  So the hard drive wasn’t faulty, it was completely missing.  Along with the caddy/enclosure needed to mount it.

Of course DataVideo no longer have spares for this model in stock, and also they used a completely different drive enclosure in the DN-400 and newer models.

It was the change in caddy that gave me a clue how to find a solution.  The hard drive slot in the DN-300 is really well built, and it seemed unlikely that DataVideo would develop a proprietary removable hard drive for this model then ditch it for the next… so the hard drive caddy had to be an off the shelf product.

A bit of Google searching and I was able to find the OEM version of the drive housing.  It’s a StarTech 2.5 SSD/HDD rack with hot swap removable rack.  These drives are also out of production, but I was able to find some for sale on Amazon US.  Keeping my fingers crossed, I ordered one.

The package arrived in the mail a couple of weeks later and sure enough, the hard drive enclosure is a perfect fit for the DataVideo unit.  All I needed to do was throw in a spare HDD and it was good to go.

The DN-300 recognised the disk, prompted me to format it and then it the recorder was ready for action.  I’ve tested it with HDV and Analogue connections and it works a great.  The only downside is the lack of built-in screen on the DN-300 so you really do have to assume it’s recording the correct input (or run the device with and external monitor).

I’m really happy that this purchase worked out so well, it’s added some serious horsepower to my vintage camera editing station, and it should give some much needed tapeless recording options for some of my cameras with more temperamental tape drives.

In the meantime I will need to stock up on BNC adaptors.  I could only find one in my parts box.

Dusting off the blank DVDs

The age old problem of tape based media is that they are fragile.  Tapes are so susceptible to damp, humidity, electromagnetic interference and even simply being stored in the wrong orientation (my top tip is don't ever stack video tapes on their side... always upright.)

Anyway, capturing analog footage onto pc, collating and editing it and laying out to portable hard drive or DVD has always been a bit of a slog.  It’s a job that I tend to put off for a rainy day, but of course I rarely get around to it.  However I’ve realised that some of my old tapes are getting on for 30 years old, and it’s only a matter of time before they succumb to tape rot.  I needed to find a solution for quickly and easily archiving that old material.

And this is where the portable DVD recorder comes in.  I spotted this old Sony VRD model on eBay for less than £35 and snapped it up.  The VRD-MC series was first issued around 2006 and was designed to allow for quick and east transfer from camcorders and video recorders to DVD.  It’s basically a PC-DVDR drive in a case with a small LCD screen.

Mine is a second generation VRD-MC3

The MC-3 appears almost identical to the earlier MC-1 and it’s not immediately obvious what features changed between the models.  For the MC-3 the only real difference is the addition of a USB connector to allow direct docking with Sony branded HDD and DVD Handycams.

The MC-3 features a simple interface with settings for various footage sources, you simply select the appropriate source (e.g. ‘Analogue Video to DVD’) stick in a blank DVD and press play on the camcorder and hit the record button.  That’s it.  The lcd screen lets you keep an eye on the footage while it’s transferred and when the capture is finished you can either finalise the disc or add more footage by connecting another source and pressing the record button again.

The VRD-MC-3 has connections for analog/phono connectors and s-video as well as an iLink 1394 connection for DV cameras.  The system only supports Standard Definition video so it won’t be any use for transferring HDV.  There are slots for Sony Duo memory sticks, SD cards or Compact Flash.

I used Sony branded DVD+R discs to make sure I had the best compatibility with my living room DVD player as well as PC.  These discs seem to be getting a bit more expensive these days but hopefully they won’t disappear from the market for a few years yet.

So if you are looking for a quick and easy method to archive old analogue tapes, without the hassle of booting up the PC, or you want to transfer some iLink MiniDV footage then it would be worth picking up one of these recorders.

I’d recommend either the MC3 like mine or the slightly later MC5 as both of those models feature the S-Video connector.  The MC6 doesn’t support S-Video and is particularly low on features compared to the earlier models.  However the final model the MC10 does support S-Video so clearly there were a lot of complaints about the MC6.

The VRD-MC-5 (Pictured above) features an S-Video connector.

The VRD-MC-10 (Pictured above) was the final model in the series.  It added some extra functionality for the DVD menus and reinstated the S-Video connection which was missing for the MC6. The casing is slightly more compact and the plain black colouring is perhaps a little more hi-tech looking than the earlier white/black versions.

The thin black line

 

They don’t make ‘em like they used to.  I’ve acquired a lot of different cameras over the years and most of them end up sitting in storage once they’ve been replaced.  I used to spend hours editing tape-to-tape back in the days before capture cards, stacks of S-VHS and M2 tapes, then once non-linear editing arrived I’d spend hours digitising tapes onto the hard drive, and then finally I moved to digital card-based DSLR cameras and I thought I was finished with tapes.

But it’s funny how time changes things, and here I am wading into the old-school tech once again to resurrect some old projects and maybe even give some old cameras one last outing before they finally succumb to the ravages of time.  Nothing lasts for ever and an analogue video camera is no exception.

I’ve got a bunch of different examples stacked in boxes and camera bags, with at least one model from each of the main consumer formats and some of them are still surprisingly capable despite their low resolution capture.

The challenges of shooting with these old cameras are mostly caused by a lack of modern niceties.  You don’t get things like histograms, focus peaking or crisp lcd monitors on these old cameras, in fact for something like this Canonvision VM-E2 you don’t even get a colour viewfinder let alone a useable focus screen.  Flick it into ‘auto focus’ and hope for the best.

I’m very curious to see how the footage holds up against more modern cameras, even a cheap mobile phone will probably have a better sensor than one of these old machines, but there is still something to be said for taking a stroll down memory lane and in this age of Terrabyte micro-sd cards and 128,000iso sensors running 8k resolution it’s weirdly refreshing to have nothing but an old analogue camera with a ccd and a spool of magnetic tape in the camera bag.  I wonder how long it will be before I remember why I upgraded in the first place? :)

Blackmagic... Intensifies

So the plus-side and the downside of clearing out storage boxes is you find all sorts of filmmaking projects and things that you forgot existed or thought were lost. I’ve unearthed a bunch of old old projects from the 90’s including the master tapes for a short film I made in college.  

Naturally I started thinking about what to do with them, and I had the idea that maybe, just maybe it would be possible to convert these old analogue formats over to digital and try doing a ‘directors cut’ with better grading etc.

So that led me down a rabbit hole of jerry rigging old VCRs and DV cameras to try and get the footage in via FireWire, and it worked, I can get these old analog tapes copied to MiniDV and then do a standard EEE 1394 cable transfer.  So far so good.

But then I started thinking what if there is a better way to do it?  One without the intermediate DV compression step?

So it turns out that Blackmagic make this Intensity Pro capture card which accepts analog inputs including S-Video which should (should) be cleaner than converting to DV using the cameras internal hardware.

My shiny new Intensity Pro 4k card arrived this morning.  Time to get out the toolkit and get it installed.