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My wife wanted to video tape a seminar at work. She volunteered the use of my camera and time to make the 12-hour (over two days) licensing review session into a DVD for coworkers that weren't going to be able to attend. Rather than shell out the $75 in tape ahead of time, I just sent my trusty old G3 400 LimeDV and Canon ZR-20 to work with her. She could just turn the camera on, connect to the Mac and record straight to the hard drive with iMovie. Then, it would already be on the hard drive and save me the time of digitizing. It still took a while to encode all of the footage, but I was able to turn the four dual-layer DVD's back around in a week. These machines are still good for a lot of uses!
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Savy Mac users and motivation an awesome combination *(:>*
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75 bucks for 12 MiniDV tapes? How did you find this place (because you certainly didn't come from DealMac)?
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Rushing out last minute to buy a bunch of tape and get the company to reimburse, sounded like it was worth $75 at the time. Afterward with deal hunting it's easy to find it for cheaper.
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Woah. You still have a working Canon ZR-20? It's good thing you didn't use tapes. Those early Canon ZRs are notorious for eating and mucking up brand new tapes.
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How big was your hard rive in the lime iMac?
12 hours sounds like a lot of GB of DV.
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You made her lug a gumdrop? Nice.
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[quote 3d]Woah. You still have a working Canon ZR-20? It's good thing you didn't use tapes. Those early Canon ZRs are notorious for eating and mucking up brand new tapes.
I have 2 ZR-45s that eat tape. I'll try to record them into a G3 600 iBook.
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I baby all of my gear, especially something that I don't have a back-up for or can't afford to replace. Case in point is the camera. I got it the summer of 2001 as a gift (back when they were $600+). I clean the heads every 4-5 tapes and have the largest capacity battery for it. It *NEVER* is used to rewind tape and is always carried in a custom padded container. I did finally order its replacement online last week from Woot, a ZR500 for $180. That being said, the ZR-20 has been a real trooper. I've run many, many hours worth of video through it and it has never failed me.
The seminar was two days, so she brought the Mac back home the first day and I dumped all of the footage off and sent it back with her the next day. I should say that I carried it to and from her car, but she carried it into the office and set it all up. I think the raw iMovie files were around 120gb for 12 hours. With editing, I got that down to two 6.5gb and two 8.5gb dual-layer dvd's.
It has a 120gb hard drive. It's normal life is spent in the kitchen as an internet/recipe/jukebox machine.
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...(a ZR10 and ZR40) both work great, as long as you _never_ rewind the tape. If you do, goodbye tape. Munch, munch.
Which brings me to a good use for tape-eating ZR camcorders; get a copy of iStopMotion, hook up the camcorder to a Mac thru firewire, and record to disk.
Makes a decent, cheap stop-motion animation setup.
