OtakuHELL tech/gear

This year's OtakuHELL has been another reminder of the limitations of Audio/Video from a VHS tapedeck and a DVD player. Yeah, I spent alot of time cueing up tapes to just the part I wanted to show and editing and burning clips to disk of specific HELLtype material to show. A whole lot of time. In fact, I spent the week leading up to the show cueing, editing and burning. Of course when I was running the set and I needed to cue up another part of a tape I was S.O.L.

Last year I brought a dual VCR/DVD player with me, just in case I needed it. It never came out of the box. I wouldn't have been able to hook it up, anyway. This year I brought my Disc Master 3 portable DVD player with and hooked it straight into the con's VHS player. It created a crude video editing setup. I could cue up DVD/SVCDs and pause them while tapes played on the VCR, blocking the signal from the DVD player. When the tape stopped playing the DVD signal would go through and play. And that worked pretty good.

The other day I picked up an Audiovox portable VCP at Target for $49.95, list price $199.95, not a bad deal. I intend to use it to cue up tapes on it's 5 inch TFT built in screen at the next OtakuHELL. the only limitation of the Audiovox is it dosen't have any standard outputs. It's got 2 headphone plugins and a DIN plugin in the back. So it looks like I'll need to get a headphone to RCA and a DIN to RCA/S-Video set-up. I just found out that a Mini-DIN is called a S-Video/S-VHS. Interesting.

What I really want is a Video mixing deck to put between the DVD and the VCR, and it looks like my options are pretty thin. So, I'm looking and waiting for a deal to come along and reading about what kind of deck I'll need. I was watching a Panasonic WJ-AVE7 Digital Video Mixer on ebay, the winning bid was $450. Way too rich for my little hobby. There are a couple listings for VIDEONICS MX-1 decks that I'm watching, too. We'll see what happens. If anybody sees any Video Mixers on the cheap post it here, please!