? about Sony D8 accessory shoe...

[JerryH]

If this question has been raised before, I apologize for the redundancy.

Anway, on the Sony website, I looked up specs on some D8 camcorders and noticed the Intelligent Accessory Shoe as an option. If I wanted to use Control-L (which the 'Shoe provides), does it hook up to my computer's serial/ubb/parallel port, or would I need to get some kind of interface card from Sony as well?

To expand my question, what kind of control would my PC be able to do with the D8 camcorder? Thanks in advance!

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K62-300, 96MegRAM, FastTrack IDE RAID (14GIG), Marvel G200

[Grigory]

Accessory Shoe is a connector for optional lamps, microphones, etc. I use it for a halogen lamp. "Intelligent" mean the ability to control the lamp operation such as turn it ON and OFF for each recording session. It also provides connections for all "intelligent" devices with different functions.

Camcorder has separate Control-l (LANC) connector on side. I did not use it, because:

DV card provides frame-accurate control of camcorder. All tape motion operations are supported, as well as time code data, recorded on DV tape. Most DV cards provide frame-accurate control and indexing capabilities. DV Raptor, for example can detect and capture each uniterrupted clip in a separate file. With standard precision, each clip contains only frames of itself.

Fast indexing mode gave me constant 3 seconds shift of beginning/end sections. Each clip contains 3 seconds of previous recording and goes 3 seconds on the next recording. However, I can join two neighboring clips perfectly in editor timeline.

So, if you buy DV card, you don't need any other controller.

Grigory