Nice! I sold several of those when I worked in the camera shop. I liked the 1st gen better for only one reason, and that was because it had a 1/8th second shutter speed, creating some great motion blur. This is what I took advantage of in this video for the "whirring head" effect. The lowest you could go on the Pi was like 1/15 or 1/30.

The letterbox was added later, as I was a big fan of widescreen movies on VHS and DVD back then, and I thought it looked better than full-screen SD video. Also, I don't recall having IEEE-1394 card issues. I was pretty lucky, I think.