On Wed, 10 Feb 2021 17:22:06 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

On 10/02/2021 16:45, jon wrote:
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.

Something like:

https://www.expandore.com/product/ad...R_Recorder.htm

(you may not like the price!)

Looks promising though..