Using the E30 in various ways

M

Mark Bennett

Guest
Hi All

Still thinking about getting an E30. I want to do the following things with it, so comments welcomed.

- I have a 10 year old library of damned heavy videos I want to dupe across. Most are 3hr. tapes. Is the 3hr mode OK for this on the E30? Since they are VHS and most in mono then they don't need to be presitine.

- To get the best VHS to DVD-R - what is a recommended set up? I had bought my mum out in Canada a new VHS deck and it had some great signal processing/clean up circuitry so I figure I should get a newer VHS deck with that built in unless the E30 does it automatically?

- I have friends who are film makers and to be able to dupe their mastered DVDs off would be a great help. Can this be done?

- Is there a preset speed to record on the E30 to make it compatible with more DVD players? Ie it only works in 2hr moder etc.

- Any idea if a DVD-R will work on the Mico 890a? Willing to post someone a cheque for a test disk to two. My local Panasonic shop is useless.

- Is anyone one using the E30 as a quick way to digitise and prep footage for further editing on a computer? I figure this would make life easier in several respects.

- If the E30 is de-region coded - will it allow you to record in NTSC etc? or is it purely playback?

- I noticed people talking about recording from Sky box. Has anyone tried it with the digital tv service?

That's it for now - thanks in advance.

Mark
 
Hi All

Still thinking about getting an E30. I want to do the following things with it, so comments welcomed.

- I have a 10 year old library of damned heavy videos I want to dupe across. Most are 3hr. tapes. Is the 3hr mode OK for this on the E30? Since they are VHS and most in mono then they don't need to be presitine.

Yes it will work fine - you will have to get a macrovision
buster if they are commercial tapes.

- To get the best VHS to DVD-R - what is a recommended set up? I had bought my mum out in Canada a new VHS deck and it had some great signal processing/clean up circuitry so I figure I should get a newer VHS deck with that built in unless the E30 does it automatically?

Try getting the Macrovision buster from lectropacks
copymate cm2 which has brightness, contrast and red,green and
blue colour correction controls.

- I have friends who are film makers and to be able to dupe their mastered DVDs off would be a great help. Can this be done?

Yes, and even commercial dvd's can be copied using a cheap
chinese multiregion player that has macrovision turned off
mine is an sva2010 and seems to have multiregion and the macrovision is disabled - it too has brightness, colour and contrast contrals available in the custom picture menu.

- Is there a preset speed to record on the E30 to make it compatible with more DVD players? Ie it only works in 2hr moder etc.

No but I do find the 2hr mode is more compatible with older
DVD players.

- Any idea if a DVD-R will work on the Mico 890a? Willing to post someone a cheque for a test disk to two. My local Panasonic shop is useless.

Send me an email at [email protected]
will send you a test disc to try...

- Is anyone one using the E30 as a quick way to digitise and prep footage for further editing on a computer? I figure this would make life easier in several respects.

If you have a drive capable of reading DVD-RAM on your
machine the *.vor files held on dvd-ram can be copied
to PC and renamed *.vob and then messed about with in
your authoring programs.

- If the E30 is de-region coded - will it allow you to record in NTSC etc? or is it purely playback?

There is no multi-region solution at this time, but it will record
in
PAL or NTSC anyway - user selectable.

- I noticed people talking about recording from Sky box. Has anyone tried it with the digital tv service?

Yep - works fine - RGB recording quality is great.

Regards

Niteman2002
 
Hi

Thanks for the info - but you said it will record in PAL or NTSC anyway - user selectable.

So does this mean I can tape UK TV shows and send to my friend in Canada and they will be in NTSC for him?
Assuming I have set it to the NTSC format?

Sounds like standards conversion to me which is darn handy to have.

Mark:D
 
Nope it will not do standards conversion

If you record an NTSC source you record in NTS

if you record a PAL Source you record in PAL

Regards

Niteman2002
 
- I have a 10 year old library of damned heavy videos I want to dupe across. Most are 3hr. tapes. Is the 3hr mode OK for this on the E30? Since they are VHS and most in mono then they don't need to be presitine.


I assume you mean the "FR" mode as there is no 3 hour mode as such. The pre-set modes are 1 hour, 2 hour, 4 hour and 6 hour.
The "FR" mode set at 3 hours gives quite a repectable performance and if as you say you are not after "pristine" results then you should be more than satisfied. The E20/30 is quite quite brilliant at copying old VHS tapes. Any condition tape and it does a very good job in deed.
 
Hi

Haven't used the E30 yet so not sure what speed it tapes at. But it would be easiest just to stick the VHS tape in one and a blank DVD-R in and let them dupe.

Most will be VHS mono so quality not brilliant, but OK.

M
 
Hi Niteman

You stated:

If you have a drive capable of reading DVD-RAM on your
machine the *.vor files held on dvd-ram can be copied
to PC and renamed *.vob and then messed about with in
your authoring programs.

-

Will this work on DVD-R's or just the RAM disks? I was talking to a friend who makes DVDs on his Mac and he suggested it was rather a long way around to work this way and it would be better to just record via firewire and let the authoring app encode the DVD.

This maybe down to the Mac having less apps for this type of thing than the PC.

So what I want to do is take my 5-10 clips and record them as seperate chapters/sections on the DVD recorder and then load them into a PC editing package (any suggestions) and then make menu's etc and just drop them into place. Followed by redording back to a generic DVD-R drive on the PC.

Will that work by the above *.vor to *.vob files method? The mac friend said it would be re-encoding the files which seems somewhat pointless/time consuming and an opportunity to add more compression artifacts.

Or is it an issue of needing a good application to work with which isn't out there yet for the mac but is for the PC?

Has anyone does this or is regularly working this way?

Thanks

Mark
 

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