A Great DV Recorder

This Sony DSR-45 DVCam video tape recorder was purchased to record professional video productions in the field. The deck is really light and works very well for what it was bought for.

The deck will record and playback consumer mini-DV, small DVCam, and large DVCam cassettes. I have not checked if it will play DVCPro tapes and will try to do so in the future.

The deck has composite, component, and firewire video in and outs. The video quality using any of these inputs is excellent. The firewire input is the small 4 pin while the analog video connections are all professional BNC with the exception of the monitor output, which is RCA. The reproduced video off the DVCam tape matches the DV format specifications.

The audio quality is all most as good as a CD with the higher bit rate selected. I say almost because it is difficult to record high levels of audio on any digital format, causing a slightly higher noise floor. A built in limiter helps prevent digital overload and work fine. This deck will record 4 channels of audio at 12 bit, 32K samples/sec. or 2 channels at 16 bit, 48K samples/sec. Unless you don't care about audio quality, only use the 16 bit/48K sample setting. The other setting will reduce the audio fidelity.

Unfortunately, the audio inputs are RCA jacks. If you use professional balanced audio equipment, you will need good transformers to convert it to unbalanced (I recommend RDL TX-1A). The audio outputs are professional balance XLR connectors.

The deck has SMPTE time code in and out. We require time code to lock several recorders together for easier editting. The inputs work with a wide range of input levels and locks easily to a SMPTE time code signal.

One of the most wonderful features of this deck is the small video monitor on the front of this deck. This monitor gives us confidence that we are recording a good signal even when our other monitors must be looking at something else. The monitor displays exactly the same as the monitor output. The resolution and color is poor, but still works fine for confidence.

Unfortunately, there are a few negatives with this deck:
1. There are no seperate audio meters. To monitor the input, a switch must be put onto "Audio" which displays the input on the small video screen. To help viewing, a large dark gray box blocks out the picture. So one cannot really use the video monitor when monitoring audio levels.

2. Another is the unbalanced audio inputs as mentioned above. The professional balanced XLR connections are desired, but it looks like they just ran out of room on the back.

3. It seems like forever for a tape to load and unload. And the loading isn't 100%. Sometimes a tape must be reloaded a second time before the deck accepts it.

4. I fyou have big fingers, it is difficult to select switches and turn knobs because they are so small.

This deck really works great as a feeder to a computer for non-linear video editing. The deck works with Premiere 6.5 and Pro as well as Avid XPressDV software. The tape transport in the deck responds to controls over the firewire very quickly with each of the software listed. The firewire allows for exact replication of the video on the tape into the computer. No dropped frames have been reported.