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Upgrading Hard Drive in Sony HDR-SR1 HDD Camcorder
clarkbox2 writes "Here is an interesting page detailing the cracking open of a $1400 camcorder just released by Sony. The pictures and text describe the opening of the outer shell, revealing the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive within. The HDR-SR1 ships with a tiny 30gb hard drive, allowing for four hours of recording in full HD. Great pictures showing the steps to recording bliss ... now where to get a battery capable of lasting for 12+ hours of full HD video?"
30 gram bits sounds heavy enough to me.
Hold on a second... Doesn't this void the warranty?
The article is a little short on details... all they did was removed the cover to access the hard drive. Oh well, its ecks-mass.
...in case anyone wants to know.7 336.asp?sid=G5120995
http://www.pricescan.com/electronics/items/item52
And here's its specs.
I assume the post is referring to capacity and not physical size. These young punks today. Why in my day we had 10MB drives and we were happy with them! And we had to walk to and from school in the driving snow uphill BOTH WAYS!
Insert witty sig here.
"The article is a little short on details... all they did was removed the cover to access the hard drive. Oh well, its ecks-mass."
Welcome to the new geekdom, were taking off the cover gains you membership.
those are easy kinda like a atari cartrage try ribbon cable with the 44 pin or what the hell ever mini ide interface thing
in other shock mounted apps
Looks like the camera was designed to allow this kind of "hack".
What next, are we going to get an article about adding RAM to an HP laptop?
A better solution would be to not buy a Sony product until they stop mistreating their customers ...
Maybe the 30G drive is just in there to keep the price down. But maybe it's part of the overall system design--a good compromise between battery life, size, weight, robustness, etc. So, I wouldn't blindly assume that putting an 80G drive into the device will make a better camcorder.
Note that the 80G drives that the article mentions are found in iPods are actually in iPods that are substantially thicker than the iPods using 30G drives.
"now where to get a battery capable of lasting for 12+ hours of full HD video?""
See that jack labeled "DC-in"?
Google "Battery Belt" and knock yourself out.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Yes, this is a mod without an actual mod. All they do is show pictures of the hard drive, and pine for an extra 1.8" hard drive. On one hand, if you spend ~1000 on a camcorder, what's an extra $240 to more than double the recording time? On the other, do you really want to take a chance that you might destroy your ~1000 investment?
Hard drive camcorders might be the wave of the future. However, removable flash based memory is also interesting, and avoids mechanical parts all together. 8 gig SD cards are here, though still expensive. The question is, will the convenience of having no moving parts and removable media outweigh the inconvenience of smaller media? Ultimately, flash (or some successor) will probably win. But in the short term, hard drives look good.
The Sony HDR SR1 has a serious problem, in that it records using AVCHD, which is uneditable by third party products at this time. Things should be better come spring (when Sony Vegas will support AVCHD).
12+ hour with a camera that size shouldn't be that difficult...
Unfortunately, the power supply upgrade will have to be belt mounted.
I don't know why they made it sound so difficult as we can do 5 hour sprints on a single battery with cameras consuming much much more power.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
This camera uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, and is therefor not 'true' HD. Although it is a great camera for the price they indicated, as there aren't any 4:4:4 cameras for under $10k
Does it exist for playback and/or editing?
Amen, not to mention that I've been recording 12+ hour streches for years...all it took was getting a laptop with a firewire in an WinDV. It's never been film capacity that's the problem. Battery is a little harder but....I'm never just holding a camera for 12 hours in my hand. Which means I'll be using a tripod. Which means I'll have time to setup. Which means I can run and tape down an extension cord from the outlets that 99% of all places have somewhere to run the buffer or power washer.
I would buy this thing in a hearbeat except for Sony's current hardon for 1080i, which is crap. I don't want it on a PS3 and I don't want it on a camcorder. I'm done with interlacing. My current camcorders are all progressive scan (even though a miserable 480p) but I've never been happier or had better looking video. If someone can make a 720p version of this then I'll take a look.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I'm going to add an external mic jack to my Canon HV10. It's the only feature missing from an otherwise sensational HD camcorder -- the ability to use a dynamic shotgun mic or condensor mics and a phantom power mixer to pull in professional-quality audio which matches the brilliant HD picture. I've not yet cracked it open, but it should be as simple as adding a stereo 1/8" audio jack wired in parallel with the factory mic, a DPDT switch, a sharp drill and nerves/balls of steel (needed to crack open a $1000 toy and start drilling/soldering and undoubtedly voiding the 1-year warranty).
JVC makes 720p HDV camcorders. They are not hard drive based, but if you are recording straight to a notebook computer, then you wouldn't need to use tapes.
That reason is the motion artifacts and image noise that seem to go along with the AVCHD format. And that's just *one* of the reasons why, instead of buying an HDR-SR1, I paid an extra ~$1200 for a Sony HVR-A1U that does not only standard DV and HDV but also DVCAM format.
I lust after the time savings of being able to bang a camera hard drive's contents into a computer at faster-than-playback speeds, but I also like the fact that DV tapes give me an original archive of what I've shot, and for at least the next few years it's likely that DV and HDV (and DVCAM and DVPRO) are going to be the dominant formats for prosumer, event, and a growing amount of ENG video.
OTOH, if you don't know what DVCAM, DVPRO and ENG mean, you'll probably be happy with the SR1. I would strongly recommend it over the similarly-priced DV-tape HC3, which has neither mic nor headset jacks. (Hint: *always* use an external mic to keep from picking up the camcorder's own mechanism noise -- and noise from your finger/hand movements if you're hand-holding the thing. Or your breating if you're 1' away from the back of the cam and trying to get clean sound from a person 10' away in front of it.)
Four hours of recording time is a LOT if you're going to be doing around-the-home and local shooting where you can unload the cam into a computer every day (and you have major HD space on the computer). The biggest on-camera battery you can buy for that cam will go about five hours, which is barely enough to get 4 hours of actual shooting.
I have never shot more than four hours in a single day, myself. In general, I think you will find that for most home, semi-pro, training video, and indie film use, you will rarely (if ever) shoot much more than two hours per day, so a 4 hour HD on the cam ought to be plenty for most people.
- Robin
If you are going to plug it into the mains, you might as well just add a firewire cable and record straight onto a computer or dvr. I think 30GB is plenty for using it on the go.
I'm slightly ahead of you on that. While I haven't actually tried to do that mod yet, I have opened the camcorder and it does appear to be relatively easy task for a mod, but I have not actually done it yet. It is not that hard to take apart or reassemble, you just have to keep track of what screw goes where though it's easy to figure out if you put the wrong screw in the wrong place.
I was thinking of just nixing or disconnecting the internal mic in favor of a standard miniplug because the internal mic is pretty close to worthless. I hope to make a kit or service.
I happen to make and sell camcorder adapters of various kinds, so that's one reason I've been in there. My business's site is linked from my personal site that you can click above my post text.
I'd rather have a timecode system (SMTPE would do fine) on the camera, and a compatable system on an external sound recorder, something that is completely solid-state, and would allow the use of real mics and preamps. If I *wanted* to use a small condensor mic and hang the recorder on the camera, I still could, but I would certainly appreciate the ability to do proper sound recording and be assured that the sound could be sync'd to the video. But then, I am far more interested in audio than video, and, maybe I'm imagining a more professionally oriented camera than what the article is actually about.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
But so long as you're giving a signal to the camcorder to sample (either @ 16 bit or 24 bit resolution) and don't need more than two tracks, synch is not an issue. It compresses the video in realtime along with the audio track.
However, if you're needing more than two tracks (for example, recording a musical act or a stage play, etc.) then I could see how you'd need an external multitrack recorder and this camera isn't designed for that. However, you could do it the old-fashioned-way and simply use a snapboard to mark the beginning of the scene.
I have one question: Why have a hard drive in a small, easily-knocked-about video camera? What's better about a delicate, shock-sensitive moving part in an electronic good that's going to be abused? There's a lot to be said for more storage, but how about buying more tapes?
Call me a Luddite, but I just bought one of these for Christmas, and I went with the tape version. Talk all the smack you want about tape, but it's durable, shock-resistant, and stands the test of time.
Besides... what's with this site? Did I miss it, or did they not even attempt the mod they're talking about?
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Yeah, if you can put 2-channel audio into the camera in the digital domain, that is very, very cool stuff for a consumer device. Just take a 2-channel mix off the board (SP/DIF? It's a Sony, so I hope it has that), and use it as a reference track or whatever, and do multitrack audio however you want.
I do think very much in terms of multitrack recording, since any video I would be doing, would be of musical acts where the audio is much more than merely incidental stuff. Consumer audio gear already gives us great multitrack digital audio.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Who can fuck for that long, I mean really!
A better question is.. How difficult is it to import and edit the video?
I don't know about this model but previous non-DV tape camcorders (like hard or flash drive or DVD based) tend to require proprietary applications to import and edit the footage. They also usually use a wonky compression technique (like a slightly "off" version of mpeg2). Sony is of course a major offender but not alone. That means no Avid, no Premiere, no iMovie or Final Cut (in fact no Apple computers at all.) This may not matter to you but not being able to use the standards (which are usually vastly superior to the software that come with the camera) is pretty limiting. It may also mean the footage is useless down the road if you no longer own the camera or have access to the software.
Me, I'm sticking with miniDV. There will still be a way to import raw DV in ten years.
First thing I thought when I saw this page was: another viral from Sony themselves...
You know, you don't have to record the 12 hours of footage in a single take. You could even, you know, recharge the batteries and shoot the next scene later, after you have spent the time setting up the location/set/lighting. Gosh, you could even buy more than one battery pack!
... and then they built the supercollider.
Not to mention tape is cheaper than hard drives and you don't have to erase it when you run out of space, just stick another tape in. After capture, put your tapes on the shelf and you already have a backup of your source.
"I forgot my mantra."