Getting Footage from Tape to Computer

[Anonymous]

What are some recommended ways of getting the footage from the tape to the computer for editing? We’ve shot on Sony HD Mini DV tapes and have been told it isn’t good to set all out in-out points via the camera’s VCR functions to save wear & tear on the camera. We’ve purchased and returned the Sony GV-D1000 Video Walkman because it doesn’t play the Sony HD tapes, but we cannot find an alternate device. Should we just purchase a consumer HD camera for this use or is there another stand-alone tape deck we can use? We are new to this and smack in the middle of the learning curve where we make every mistake at least once. Any advice is welcome. Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

We’ve done the same, but there are times when we’ve taken much more footage than we need and don’t want to store it all on the hard drive. The tape becomes the archive and we only bring over what we need for the project. We could just use the VCR on the camera to navigate through the tape to find the footage we want, but we’ve heard that this can become too much wear on the tape mechanism over time so we should use an external tape deck. The Sony model I mention above is the only one we’ve found. I’m hoping there are other choices out there. Or is everyone just storing all footage on RAID?

[Author]

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