On Wed, 10 Feb 2021 16:03:16 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

On 10/02/2021 13:41, jon wrote:

I have an XL1 video camera I purchased for a company project in 2000
and it was never used, in fact it is still in pristine condition,
having only a couple of hours use since new. It is not worth very much
now, but it is a super SD camera that uses MiniDVD tapes. I am thinking
about converting it to record on solid state media. This would require
removing the tape drive and replacing it with a mini recorder. At the
moment I am just thinking about the practicality of the modification.
The other anomaly is the useful digital output from the 'Firewire IEEE
1394' socket, there are very few adapters or connecting devices around
now for this obsolete format, although it was a premium digital
connection solution in it's day.

Easy enough to get PCI firewire cards still. Some of the better cameras
could also be used as real time digitizers - feeding video in on
composite or s-video, and outputting to the firewire.

Has anybody any thoughts on such a project..?

You will no doubt be able to tap off a RGB or composite feed from the
camera somewhere, so could add a digitizers to that (ignoring the
internal one). The tricky bit might be getting iot to perform properly
as a camera without a running tape - depending on what of any interlocks
are present.

You might even be able to interface the camera sensor to the camera
input on a raspberry Pi, which includes most of the other hardware you
would need.

There are outputs for RGB and s-video, but I wanted to utilise the digital
output. It would be straight forward if could obtain a mini real time
recorder with a firewire input.