Shooting straight onto eSata drives

[jimmyb248]

I'm looking at different ways of shooting at the moment, and one way that seems to be quite a neat and easy way of doing things would be to get myself a MacBook Pro, an eSata express card, plus one of Lacie's Two Big 1tb eSata drives. This would allow for a fast enough speed to shoot directly from the HVX onto the laptop, through something like Scopebox or HD log maybe?

Do you guys think this would be an easy way of doing it? We'll be travelling around a lot in the shoot so this solution would allow us to combine the drive and the video assist into one, which saves on a lot of space. Would the monitor on a Macbook Pro be good enough to check focus and things?

[nsoltz]

If you are in a controlled environment where you can go firewire from HVX to MacBook Pro, this is definitely a way of doing things. I personally have DVRack Pro on my MacBook Pro and while I have only done some test shooting with it, I think it is a great workflow to utilize more accurate scopes than FCP scopes. But you could always just do a Capture Now in FCP and accomplish the same thing but without the features Scopebox or DVRack offers.

eSata is definitely the way to go and I advise against using Firewire at this point.

I rolled my own eSata drive with a loss-leader Seagate 750 and a Wiebetech enclosure with Wiebetech's Express34 sata card. I just hate spending extra money for LaCie packaging and marketing. LaCie is great for people who have deep enough pockets to spend much more than what you could accomplish with a drive, a box and a screwdriver (and Wiebetech even includes the screwdriver with their enclosure).

Ned Soltz