How do I Record a Live CCTV Broadcast coming from a Roland Video Mixer?

[Andrew Prince]

I'm a new Media Specialist at a public elementary school here in Miami. We have a CCTV studio with two old camcorders being fed into a newer Edirol by Roland Video Mixer. The mixer then feeds into an outdated VHF player. I'm upgrading the equipment. We're getting a Panasonic HC-250 Camcorder to replace the older of the two cameras and we need some type of DVD recorder/player (I guess) with a built-in tuner to replace the old VHF player. I want to be able to record a live broadcast from the video mixer to replay and/or edit at a later time. Does anyone know how would I go about doing this? And what specific DVD Recorder should I get? Should it be a DVD/VCR combo? A tech guy that serves our school district said it needs to have its own tuner but he didn't say much else.
Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

[Krispy Kritter]

You mention "CCTV" and then list a camcorder. CCTV typically refer to fixed point security cameras which feed live video/audio by video cable or network/IP. In which case the type of recorder would vary based on the camera used.

The camera you listed is a camcorder which records onto SD card. So you simply record and then transfer the video to a PC for editing. You could transfer by moving the SD card, or likely by cable (ie: USB or firewire, whatever the camera supports). The camera may or may not output live video, but if it does, your "recorder" would be selected by how the live video is output (ie: USB, firewire, composite video cable). I'm not familiar with that cam to know how it works.

[smrpix]

Asssuming the Edirol Video Mixer is the one piece you don't want to replace -- which model are you using? That will determine your input and output connections and limitations.

You may want to consider recording directly from the mixer to a PC since that will give you the greatest flexibility for editing.