History of FS100 problems & fixes?

L

Lenilenapi

Carbonite Member
I'm totally confused about whether the Firestore FS100 is now considered a reliable device or not.
I have heard much in the recent past that indicated it was not reliable, but now see more people here praising it.
Can somebody provide a little history of the firestore problems and solutions so we can have some background to evaluate these claims.


Some questions I have:
What were the problems?

Have those problems been fixed?

Were some of those problems with Final Cut Pro instead of the firestore itself and were they fixed in a recent upgrade?

Which upgrades to the firestore fixed what and can you do those upgrades just with software or do you need new units entirely?
etc.


Thanks,
Lenny Levy
 
I can't give you anything comprehensive, but from what I remember the initial release had "dropouts" on the footage (like DV dropouts). The first firmware release fixed that. The second firmware release added thumbnails to the recordings. The third firmware release is due in a couple of months and will add "native" mode recording.

By and large people seem a lot happier with the device now.
 
Hey barry, This is off topic, but i finally got your book. Great job of explaining basic principles. Thanks. Very comprehensive.

Re: FS100. I'm not sure what the issues were, but our local rental house bought 3 and decided they weren't trustworthy enough to rent a little while ago. It could have been user error, or maybe they just needed the updates, but I thought it was more than dropout issues. I went over there to check it out one day and they could not get it working properly.

I am calling them tomorrow for their scoop as well. I could use them on an upcoming job if they work.
 
The two posters who seem happiest with them are BenB and nsoltz. mlsphoto had a CitiDisk and got rid of it and replaced it with an FS-100 and seems very happy with it too.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Some questions I have:
What were the problems?

Have those problems been fixed?
Click to expand...
I can only speak regarding the FS4 Pro, not the FS100, but my problems have been largely 'dropped clips'. Every now and then, on import, it gives a 'failed to import' message, and eventually when you look at all the clips, the affected ones just say "no media". Of my colleagues, some have had no problem at all, others have had far more severe problems.

In all our cases, overall we find the FS4 of real benefit. But we would NEVER consider using it as the sole recording medium, it's always used together with tape.

It is also not weatherproof, and it would be difficult to make it so without affecting the cooling. In severe weather, we can always revert to tape only recording, but if you were relying on it as the sole way of making a recording.........?

It's also worth mentioning the long boot up time. If we need to go from switch on to recording in a hurry, we can always record to tape for the first shot.
 
hi there!

we did a greenscreen shooting with the hvx and a FS100 last week. it turned out very well. the FS100 worked like a charm. we didn't had to set it up ourselves, the camera was already set up to work with the FS100. we shot about 30mins of footage and after copying to the pc we converted the clips with cineforms aspect-hd and started working on the key in after effects.

all clips were recorded properly, no dropped frames or dropped clips.
it was a good experience working with the FS100 and the hvx. and since this was all rental euqipment we didn't had to go through the hassle of getting it working which surely isn't an easy task. but if everything is set up correctly it works like a charm..

cya
 
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Here is the full list of firmware fixes so far:

version 3.x.x.xxxxxxxx:
- 720p Native recording support
-?

version 2.0.0.04061606:
- Auto Stream Detect
- The thumbnails displayed correctly from P2 Viewer and FCP
- When in EXT TC mode, Non Drop is correctly detected
- Added the unlock (UNLK) front panel confirmation screen
- Support 999 clip limit properly
- Various disk performance improvements
- Enabled a timer to update TC/UB DISP screen every second
- Fixed the thumbnail's aspect ratio for HD clips

version 1.0.0.04061906:
- Fixed Avid Import Clip issue when powering down between recordings.

version 1.0.0.04052606:
- Oxford Semiconductor 1394 Bridge chips configuration updated upon System Reset.
 
My company, Shatterglass Studios, shoots only with an FS-4 with our DVX and an FS-100 with the HVX. We absolutely love it. But part of that is because we'd been using our FS-4 for awhile before we got the FS-100 and they're very similar in usage so it didn't perplex us or anything. It felt right at home.

We have had a couple different problems with the FS-100 though, and I'm not sure what the direct cause was, and I'm hoping someone might be able to enlighten me. The first time we were shooting some aerial shots on a helicopter and I had the fs100 mounted on the camera and the wind was very strong and I noticed while up there that it was taking upwards of 3 to 5 minutes to finalize any time I'd click stop. When we got down I noticed I'd lost a bit of footage to entire dropped sequences. One of my partners mentioned that it may have been the wind blowing into the fans or something to that effect and I considered it until a couple weeks later when we were shooting a music video in a club and for half the shoot the firestore did the exact same thing. Someone else considered the idea that the bass underneath the stage that we were shooting on was interupting something but I just don't know. Those are the only 2 times I've had absolutely ANY problems, and they were major but I couldn't really detail the exact problem. Hoping someone might have any ideas, as I'd like to prevent it in the future. I'm about 99% sure that the environment had something to do with the problem and it wasn't just a random freak event with the firestore itself.
 
lboyce said:
The first time we were shooting some aerial shots on a helicopter and I had the fs100 mounted on the camera and the wind was very strong and I noticed while up there that it was taking upwards of 3 to 5 minutes to finalize any time I'd click stop. When we got down I noticed I'd lost a bit of footage to entire dropped sequences.
Click to expand...

I wonder if this was due to the unit getting colder than usual. I think electronic items can operate slowly when cold - bad example but I have found that when my mobile (cell) gets very cold, i.e. left someplace cold for a long time, it operates very slowly; screen changes, menu's loading etc.
 
Lenilenapi said:
I'm totally confused about whether the Firestore FS100 is now considered a reliable device or not.
I have heard much in the recent past that indicated it was not reliable, but now see more people here praising it.
Click to expand...

As someone who has been experimenting with all of these types of devices since the very beginning, I can tell you that we have had problems with all of them. Ususally, we experienced either missing clips, or some droputs. Missing clips were more prevalent. Of course, we were using them with cameras that had tape rolling as a backup. Obviously, the risk with the 200 is higher, since we won't have a backup option.

To be fair, the Firestores were no better or worse. Have they improved since then? One would hope so... everything tends to. Are they reliable enough to bet the whole farm on... each person has to evaluate that risk for themselves I'm afraid...
 
Hmm... Seems to me in production we are only interested in technology you can bet the farm on.
I'm a cameraman, not a producer who might decide he wants to take a chance with some new technology. I need to tell my clients - "Yes this is safe you will not lose money because you're a guinea pig".

It sounds like no one here is saying that.

I do feel I can say that about P2 cards as long as the right procedures are followed.
 
Agreed. I know how heavily everyone was anticipating the hard disk recorders coming out, but when I first saw one I said "there has never been a better argument for P2 cards."

Any hard disk recorder is a stopgap measure until solid state becomes large enough and cheap enough. Until then they serve a purpose, but it's gonna be just like "microdrives" in still cameras; as soon as SD cards or CF cards got big enough, nobody bothered with microdrives anymore.

Until then the FireStore is probably the best of the selections, simply from the company's aggressive policy of fixing issues and adding features, plus their track record.
 
3 weeks ago I was shooting chroma key headshots for a college Jumbotron Football show. After copying the files and then importing them into FCP, to my horror, 17 of the 66 shots were full of drop out type artifacts. In fact, I couldn't even get them to play properly. My FS-100 had the last update also. It was very disappointing. We were lucky we had a back up dvx100 rolling tape at the same time. I hate bringing a back up camera to a shoot though. I am definately having second thoughts about the FS-100. So far, that has happened twice. I shoot alot of long interviews for documentaries, so I'm not sure what to do.
 
Hi, First time caller, long time listener...

I'm having a problem with my FS-100. Yesterday I upgraded the firmware to V2.0, and now I can't seem to be able to set the FS-100 to record on any other mode than HD. Everytime I try setting it to "DVCpro/DV REC", once I'm out of the menu screen and hit the record button on the camera, it records in HD...

Anyone else have this problem?
 
cwpost said:
3 weeks ago I was shooting chroma key headshots for a college Jumbotron Football show. After copying the files and then importing them into FCP, to my horror, 17 of the 66 shots were full of drop out type artifacts. In fact, I couldn't even get them to play properly. My FS-100 had the last update also. It was very disappointing. We were lucky we had a back up dvx100 rolling tape at the same time. I hate bringing a back up camera to a shoot though. I am definately having second thoughts about the FS-100. So far, that has happened twice. I shoot alot of long interviews for documentaries, so I'm not sure what to do.
Click to expand...
Have you updated the firmware on the FS-100 to the latest version? That was a problem with the very first release but is supposed to be fixed now.
 
JCP said:
Hi, First time caller, long time listener...

I'm having a problem with my FS-100. Yesterday I upgraded the firmware to V2.0, and now I can't seem to be able to set the FS-100 to record on any other mode than HD. Everytime I try setting it to "DVCpro/DV REC", once I'm out of the menu screen and hit the record button on the camera, it records in HD...

Anyone else have this problem?
Click to expand...

As far as I know the FS-100 is autosensing the data stream. You cannot set the camera to HD mode and the FS-100 to DV mode and expect it to work. If you set the camera to HD mode, the FS-100 will record HD regardless of what the menu item is set to (unless I got that completely wrong; hopefully some FS-100 expert will weigh in here).
 
cwpost,
what version of FCP are you using and which version of firmware in the FS100.
Your post is especially scary.
Have you ever tried rolling directly into FCP through "capture now". You have to be very careful about set-up and we are currently chasing a sync delay with some powerbooks, but we haven't lost any footage yet on a number of music concerts.
You always get the same timecode though.
 
I am using FCP 5.0.4 on a quad G5. I've never tried rolling directly into FCP with an AJA Kona card, Thanks, I'll have to try that. I did the firmware update on the FS-100 before the shoot. In fact the chroma key shoot was the first thing I shot after updating the FS-100. I shot everything in DVCPro 50. After I copied all the clips to FCP, I did a "reformat" function on the FS-100. Since then I have shot several times, but haven't been able to repeat the problem. It still makes me nervous.
Colton
 
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