Best Hard Drive Recorder....

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dpavid

Active member
OK. I just got 3 HVX's and need a Hard Drive Solution other than P2 for long format record times. At NAB, I found 3 companies who make options. Focus Enhancements, Novia?, and CitiDisk. While each has its pros and cons, I'd like to know what you guys are using and how you like it. Citidisk is the cheapes by far but the featrures are limited to none. Focus Enhancements has all the options, but the attached price tag.

In your real life opinion, what works the best for you in the field. Thanks in advance.
 
Have not seen nNovia yet and am hoping to get my hands on a CitiDisk HD to test. It really has not started to ship yet but production models are ready according to Shining Technology. The FS-100 is a solid performer. It is bulky and a little cumbersome and really needs lots more power than the standard battery (don't even consider it without the extended battery) but it is solid, feature packed and works very well even under rough conditions.

Ned Soltz
 
Great Feedback! Eaxctly what I was looking for. I was goping to order 3 FS-100's this week but might hold off and do more research. I was impressed by the price of the CitiDisk at NAB...so cheap relative to FS-100. I could buy 3 CitiDisk drives cheaper than 2 FS-100's. What I didn't like was the fact that I couldn't erase media straight from the camera like the FS-100 which would mean still sifting though the raw clips on my NLE. I want to save time and eleminate that and just work with the good footage from the field and dump all the bad takes.

I produce 3 TV shows right now, and possibly 5-6 by years end. The host for 2 of them take a few times to get the right take and shot I'm looking for. Its time consuming to go through all the bad takes to find the few good one's and then make edit decision which one we're going to use.

I never even considered battery life and fully overlooked it. Had I got the FS-100 without the extended battery, which I probably would have, I would have been pissed! Thanks nsoltz for the heads up!

More feedback please!
 
The CitiDISK HD just started shipping in earnest and we'll have rapid availability as soon as we've cleared our order backlog which is pretty big right now :)

I'll have systems on display at the WEVA convention in Las Vegas if anyone is going there at both the B&H and Armato's Pro Video booths.
 
do a little dance

do a little dance

Quick question, What can a P2 card do that the Firestore can't? and can you record to the firestore without a P2 card and if so will it respond and show recording on the camera or do you have to press record on the Firestore....fill in gaps if you can thanks....
 
Quick question, What can a P2 card do that the Firestore can't?
Click to expand...

Loop record mode
Shockproof
Dustproof
Vibration-proof
Heat-proof -- you can use 'em at the South Pole or at Death Valley
Humidity-proof
Silent
No cooling fans necessary
No firewire cable connection necessary, no worries of the cable coming disconnected
No separate battery necessary -- no need to charge a separate battery, or bring a separate charger with you, and no worries about that external battery dying during a shot.

You can see thumbnails of your clips in-camera
You can play back your clips on a high-def TV or monitor
You can see the slow-mo or fast-motion effects during playback
You can see and attach metadata right in-camera
You can use the shot mark and text memo functions

You can record 2.5 times as much footage per gig by using the 720pN "native" recording mode

You can drop 'em, you can run over 'em with a car, you can slip 'em in your shirt pocket, you can hot-swap 'em and offload 'em to a computer so you can keep rolling and rolling and rolling for hours at a time on one continuous take.

They're so fast you can offload them to two (or maybe even three) hard drives simultaneously without 'em even slowing down (appreciably). Just make sure the hard drives are on different busses (i.e., offload to one USB2 drive and one firewire drive, or to the internal laptop drive and an external firewire drive, etc).

You can fed-ex 'em without worrying about whether they'll survive the trip.

You can keep a small handheld camera profile instead of having to figure out where to carry or mount the firestore and wrangle the cable that goes to it.

You can record an interview in a small room without hearing fan noise.

----------------------------------------

Now, on the other side of the coin: what can the FireStore do that the P2 cards can't?

First, it can record 100 minutes at a time. Or 200 minutes of DV50, or 400 minutes of DV. Hard to argue with that. If you need long record times, the FS-100 is the portable answer.

Second, you can daisy-chain two FS-100's together to double that potential recording time.

Third, it may be possible to have the FS-100 record in something other than MXF format (I am sure it can do that for DV, don't know about the other recording formats) so it could perhaps make for direct importing into FCP if you were to record live to Quicktime format, for example. P2 cards won't do that.

Fourth, you would be able to plug the FS-100 into any computer and offload the data without having to have installed a driver first; the P2 cards require a driver to be installed before they'll be recognized by the computer.

I think the FS-100 definitely fills a need. I don't think it's a viable replacement for the cards, I think the cards are superior in so many ways that it's hard to keep the list down to a manageable size. But when you need that long recording time capability, the FS-100 does the job.
 
I would have gone the P2 card/P2 Store route if the P2 Store could hold more than 60 gigabytes.

Barry nailed it regarding the pros and cons. One other "pro" for the Firestore is that the record-ahead buffer is 6 seconds instead of 3 with the P2 card.
 
Not currently, no. But since FireStores are field firmware upgradeable, I do have hope that they'll introduce a new firmware version sometime that will enable such a capability. EDIUS and FCP and DVC Rack can all do it (by stripping out duplicate frames on-the-fly) so I hope Focus expends the effort to do the same; that would push the FS-100 up to being able to record over four hours of 720/24pN.
 
Barry_Green said:
Not currently, no. But since FireStores are field firmware upgradeable, I do have hope that they'll introduce a new firmware version sometime that will enable such a capability. EDIUS and FCP and DVC Rack can all do it (by stripping out duplicate frames on-the-fly) so I hope Focus expends the effort to do the same; that would push the FS-100 up to being able to record over four hours of 720/24pN.
Click to expand...


That would be an excellent upgrade for the FireStore and would influence my decision to purchase the Cineporter. (being that the firestore could be used on DVX100a as well as my HVX200)

I currently have over a terabyte of 720/24PN Data that I have shot using the P2 workflow on the HVX200 and can not afford the disk space of anything but the native mode for recording HD.

I have a 1.7T RAID5 disk array 8x250gb SATA and archive to 250gb (100$ each) Sata Drives. I am now asking my clients to purchase an archive drive for their projects.
 
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