WELL MY NEW TOY CAME TODAY AND I'M VERY LOST. I HAVE MANAGED TO GET IT HOOKED UP AND I'VE ALSO DOWNLOADED 2 MOVIES TO THE HARDRIVE. I HAVE ALOT OF QUESTIONS, BUT I WILL JUST START WITH A COUPLE:

1. WHATS THE QUICKEST WAY TO GET A MOVIE TO THE HHD OR IS WATCHING IT THE ONLY WAY.

2. WHEN TRANFERING A MOVIE FROM THE HHD TO DISC, IS HIGH SPEED DUBBING THE WAY TO GO.

ALSO LETS SAY WERE TALKING ABOUT A 2HR LONG MOVIE RECORED IN XP


BOTH OF THESE ARE ABOUT SAVING TIME OR IF ANYBODY ELSE HAS SOME TIME SAVING METHODS - LMK

I've owned my E80 for about a month now and I love it. To answer your questions:

1.) You don't have to watch but whatever you copy to HDD (or straight to disc) from an external source is copied in real time. Is that what you're asking? No recorder I know of is any different; no recorder will copy a video bitstream straight to HDD.

2.) Yes, high speed recording is the best way to go when dubbing from HDD to disc, either a DVD-R or RAM. Dubbing to DVD-RAM will take roughly half as much time as to DVD-R, I suppose because of the different way the discs are manufactured. How fast a video is dubbed to DVD-R will depend on the bits used, not the length of the video. For instance, an hour video recorded at "XP" will take nearly an hour to dub to DVD-R while the same video recorded at "SP" will take about a half as long.

Some advice: Set DVD-R Compatability to "ON". Do this before you copy your source to HDD. If you add markers to your video, you must use high speed dubbing (DVD-R Compatibility must be "ON" also) to retain them to disc. If you use anything other than high speed dubbing, the video will be reincoded and your markers will be lost.

Warning: A two-hour movie recorded at "XP" will not dub to DVD-R or RAM using high speed recording - too many bits. You must select "SP" or better yet, "FR" (Flexible Recording) to be able to fit it onto a DVD-R. An "XP" recorded video cannot be much over an hour in length to fit onto a DVD-R.

I highly recommend using "FR" (Flexible Recording) for anything 2 hours or less that you intend to dub to DVD-R. This will maximize the bit rate and make maximum use of available recording area.

Correction to the above: there are some dvd recorders that will accept a digital input from, for instance, a digital camcorder. The E80 does not appear to be one of them, however.

Thanks BigT - hope to hear some more from you - stef

I got my 80 the other day and LOVE it.

But I'm having a problem (as I have seen on other forums) that you can't dub at high speed to DVD-R when you initially record in FR. I put some stuff onto my hard drive using FR and then tried to put it onto a DVD-R and it said it wouldn't fit. So I had to re-incode the whole thing.

After you copy the video onto the hard drive, can you do any editing? Simple stuff like cutting commercials out, basic titling, adding chapter markers and that sort of thing?

We're looking at getting the DMR-E100HS, which is the 80's bigger brother which includes firewire input and a 120GB hd. I was just wondering what to expect.

Commercials? Yes.
Titles? Yes. It's very basic. Though they now let you pick the menu's background color, where as the E30 was just blue.
Chapters? Sort of. You can add "markers", and if you use "High Speed Dubbing" it will turn them into chapters, otherwise the machine will add a chapter every 5 minutes. (Can't do thumbnails though.)
You can also divide programs. Say there's a marathon of a show, and you set to record at the highest quality(XP) for 6 hours. Obviously you wouldn't be able to fit all of that on 1 dvd. So you can break it up into segments and retain the quality.

I have the E30 adn E80, so my answers are based on that, but AFAIK the basics of all the Panasonics are the same.

digitalfreaknyc: I use FR recording all the time and I am able to dub the result to DVD-R using high speed. Be certain that DVD-R Compatability is set to "ON"! If you're getting a "doesn't fit" message (which I've gotten a couple times), you're trying to fit more bits onto the DVD-R than it can contain. You must either reincode (as you have done) or, as I'd prefer, divide the program and dub to two discs. This is inconvient but quality is not lost.

Jason: I'd get the E100 (or E120) over the E80 simply because the E100 will dub to DVD-R at 4X over the E80's 1X. The E120 will play DVD-A (the E80 and E100 will also, but they will only output 2 channels). I believe you can add thumbnails on the E100 and E120.

Jason: There are three basic editing tools on the E80: Divide Program, Shorten Segment and Markers. Divide Program splits the program into two, Shorten Segment allows you to delete seqments within the program and Markers allows you to add chapter markers. WARNING! To retain chapter markers when you dub to DVD-R, you must set DVD-R Compatibility to "ON" and use high speed dubbing. Otherwise your markers will be lost and the machine will add it's own.

The downside of adding markers is that they can't be named and they don't appear on any menu. For some of my recordings, I get around this by dividing the program into titles which can be named and then dubbing the desired titles to DVD-R. Title names do appear on the menu, you understand that they are really chapter names, and your player will play them all in order, perhaps with a slight pause between them (machine variable). Furthermore, your player will skip between titles using your PREV and NEXT buttons just like they were chapters and yor can select titles through the menu, simulating scene selection. I'm doing this with all my Looney Tunes LD's and it works great. Be aware that in using the method searches and time elapsed and time remaining are of the title being played and not the whole program. Small loss for me.

I don't think I had my thinking cap on in my reply to digitalfreaknyc: FR recording adjusts the bit rate so that it fit a program onto a DVD-R regardless of it's length. I wonder though, if sometimes, because of the varible bit rate encoding that Panasonic uses, that long programs will a lot of action (requiring more bits to encode) could exceed the maximum capacity of a DVD-R. That's the only explanation I can think of at the moment.