GoKawiilBring back MiniDV with this Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT
In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras.
The alternative is an old used MRU like Sony's HVR-MRC1, which runs around $300 on eBay.
In addition to a direct camera connection, this setup can be used to archive MiniDV tapes to the Pi with dvgrab , or even with other FireWire devices like audio interfaces and hard drives. After Apple dropped FireWire support in macOS Tahoe, some users were left in a lurch.
Video
This blog post is a companion to today's video, where I test recording to tape and to the Pi using two different setups, and even test how the 'old' NLE editing workflow used to work when I started my YouTube channel in 2006:
Don't like watching videos? I don't blame you—read on!
Hardware
The hardware I used in my final setup (pictured above) includes:
Raspberry Pi 5 (I used a 4GB model, but any amount of RAM should suffice)
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