Cable port tap RF from Sony CCD-TRV58?
 

I would love any help with this!

Hey all first time poster,

I'm trying to find an RF tap point for my Sony CCD-TRV58 for 8/hi8 tapes.

On this camera there is a 20 pin connector hidden under a door on the left side of the camera but I cant seem to find any documentation online about this. The service manual does have something lists it as "CPC jig for BX/BK (J-6082-521-A)" or "CN713" (which is what it looks like it's actually called) but nothing really shows up online for that term, or anything that plugs into this for to go to a breakout board.

Thanks in Advance!

Welcome. :)

But before you go down that path, have you attempted to do a normal capture with s-video and a good capture card? Because the RF tape method is still suffering from excessive ringing/halo not present on source tapes. Quality degrades, especially from with-TBC quality gear.

Remember: Do a normal capture first. Then, if if you see reason, or if fancy strikes you, consider RF.

It's not too different from VHS advice of "JVC first, then Panasonic AG-1980". It's because the 2nd method has downsides, risks, costs.

The main problem with that RF method is near-complete lack of documentation, excluding a few select/blessed devices. You're on your own for anything else. This is probably one of those times.

Yeah I've captured with S-Video/VirtualDub and it looks pretty good. I'm just a tinkerer and just wanted to see what I can find out :)

Very good. :salute:

Yep, that is a tinker project for sure.

In many cases, the service manual may have clues/info on a proper tap point. Some % of guesswork and "YOLO" will be needed. You probably won't fry anything, maybe brick it (temporarily or permanent).

Your main hope might be to find somebody that has already done this, with that model -- but then, you also have to subject yourself to some pretty crass discussion locations (which is why pros, even serious hobbyists, aren't joining those unfriendly communities).

Note: RF discussion has always been allowed at this site. The problem is that the people discussing it have too often been problems (vulgar, unprofessional, non-serious, juvenile). Posts had to be edited, one person banned.

I wish I had the answer for you, but maybe somebody else can come along. :congrats:

I didn't realize there was issues with people discussing it in the past, thanks for the heads up!

Head over to discord where you can get help, unless someone here done it on the same camcorder.

That would be one of those unsavory locations.

Really the Discord or the subreddit are your best options about RF talk, maybe Videohelp but that's unlikely. I have no personal experiences with either of those places, so I ain't giving them praise.

Maybe don't state that you came from here, then they'd most likely shame you that you are wasting your time with "outdated legacy crap".

But hey, you wanna mess around with it and try and see if you can get it to work. Then I'd say go for it. Maybe this can lead to another unbiased comparison between both methods. We need more of them. I'm really the only guy here who did some recently. Granted I don't have Decode hardware myself (can only use the software) so I have to rely on old existing captures.

-- merged --

Also on the topic of tinkering, can find it to a bit rewarding. For example I wanted to use GraphStudioNext and a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 to capture Close Captioning data (An IO-Data doesn't work in Windows XP despite it having a VBI pin, guess I'm unlucky or that only works in Windows 10.. somebody else over on VideoHelp managed to get CC data from his IO-Data GVUSB2)

When I finally got it to work I went "Holy shit, finally!" so hey, found a way to dump the CC data as a raw file and convert it to subtitles. Though they were out of sync with the audio.

Is that rather common?