Small Laptop instead of Fire Store?

[viellearoue35]

Hey Guys. Gotta question here. I just got my HVX last Wednesday and am anxiously awaiting my P2 card. I figured out how to record HD footage to my G4 1.33GHZ ibook. Shooting at 720P I can get at least 2 minutes of capturing before it has a dropped frame and stops. At 1080i, I can only record about 20 seconds before it crashes. I only have 512megabytes of RAM. I can upgrade this to 1.5, will this make a difference or is it my 1.33GHZ that is holding me back?

And my big question is, instead of going the firestore route for extended capturing, might it be possible to purchase one of those extra small sized PC laptops that I see in computer stores which have decent specs and use it in place of a firestore? Looks like it could be mounted on top of the HVX like a Marshall monitor and serve as a HD live capture drive and monitor. I'm curious if anyone has done this. Any info would be greatly appreciated. -jason

[Shane Ross]

DRIVE SPEED. A 5400 RM drive is not fast enough to capture 720P DVCPRO HD, much less 1080i. No, what people do is use POWERBOOKS or MACBOOKS and route the signal thru to an external firewire drive. In this case they use a firewire card in the PCMCIA or PCI Express slot to get another firewire bus.

[Arson]

just swap p2 cards and offload to the laptop
its not hard
its just dragging and dropping files off a mounted drive
I've never seen a continious shot that was long enough to NEED a continious stream.
Plus then you have to some insanely large file to edit small amounts out of

[BenB]

I've never seen a continious shot that was long enough to NEED a continious stream.

You should see the hour plus interviews I've recorded. P2 and FS-100 both break these long shots up into small segments of usually only a couple minutes each. Neither makes an insanely large file. Although I wish they did.

[jimmyb248]

Out of interest, if I were use route my camera through a Macbook Pro into an external hard drive, would I need firewire 800 for that? As my one only has FW 400.

[David Saraceno]

You should see the hour plus interviews I've recorded. P2 and FS-100 both break these long shots up into small segments of usually only a couple minutes each. Neither makes an insanely large file. Although I wish they did.

Wondering Ben, why FAT32 has to be the format election for the FS-100.

Is it because the software is Linux based?

Is there another way to format the FS-100 -- not be the user by by Focus?

[BenB]

FAT 32 is the format of the P2 cards, so I can only guess that the FS is mimicking P2 cards as much as it can. I know that FAT 32 is very efficient in a small appliance system like this. Most TiVO type devices and MP3 players are Linux and FAT 32. Small, simple, compact, fast. I don't really know, can only speculate.

[TwistedLincoln]

Wondering Ben, why FAT32 has to be the format election for the FS-100.

Is it because the software is Linux based?

Is there another way to format the FS-100 -- not be the user by by Focus?

There are intellectual property issues with NTFS, so that's ruled out. And as there is not yet native support in Windows (not sure about MacOS) for ext3 or other free file systems, it is the logical choice.