Transferring from Sony analog to FCP7

Here's a deck tech puzzler-

We have several hundred classroom tapes generated by my dad's clinic for autistic children, and they show some of his earliest work helping these kids become functioning human beings. This was his life work, a system now called The Miller Method(R), an alternative to behavioral approaches.

The tapes are recorded from a 1975 Sony Portapak system now long gone. The Sony PP playback deck I'm using sounds like it's ready to die. But meanwhile, I'm trying to feed a tape signal into my DSR-45 DVCAM deck, which has, among many great features, a built-in timebase corrector which these tapes badly need to maintain a stable image for digitizing. SO that's in the middle of the chain.

I have Video In selected on the deck, as the signal is simply black and white composite with one channel audio. I am plugged into true Video In and Audio In, not Monitor plugs. I am experimenting with E-to-E settings in the menu system, with no luck. Except for one early try, the signal is not showing up on the deck's built-in monitor.

What did I do right??

I have FCP7 booted on a MacBook Pro and ready to receive Capture Now clips via Firewire from the DSR-45. There is next to nothing I can find in the Manual, nor on the web about a setup for this particular kind of transfer.

The weak link is me-- I think I don't have the proper E-to-E recipe. Just thought I'd throw this puzzler out there. Digitizing analog records is becoming popular.

Wisdom very welcome.

Best, as always.
Loren

hi Loren.

does the signal make it to some other monitor or tv?
is the problem the deck or the signal?

i also wonder if, as you are converting to DV anyway, you should record to tape, so as to have a more modern back-up.


nick

Hello, Nick-

And thanks for logging in.

That's a great suggestion, but I don't have a tape budget-- want to xfer directly from analog through the -45 to DV via Firewire.

In the -45 the signal showed up ONCE on the internal deck monitor during fiddling and I haven't been able to replicate it-- or the tape lost its control track at some point.

I was wondering if anyone's wrestled with such old transfers, either a personal E-E setup wth a DSR-45 or similar DV/DVCAM deck, or maybe at a replication house job.

Best, as always.
Loren S. Miller

I'm racking my brain for the correct terminology - there was a setting that you had to have enabled... oh, non-controllable device.

If you're set up e to e and you have non controllable device selected, you can press record on the system and then run the tape, which should make the signal show up and be captured. We used to do this with and old SP deck connected to a DSR-11.