Capturing footage into a Hard Drive

A

Angelcyk

Well-known member
I have a shoot coming up and I was wondering what is the best way to offload to a Hard drive. It's just a one day shoot and the director wants to take the hard drive and labtop and leave right after the last take. I was thinking about running a 66ft firewire cable from the camera to the a hard drive using live capture from FCP. And I wasn't sure if anybody has done this and had any problems. Or anybody out there might know a better way. We thought about using Firestore but then the director is going to have to wait while I get the firestore and dump everything into Hard drive.
And the next question is.... is it possible to do a live capture from one labtop and dump the footage into 2 hard drives at the exact same time?
 
You will never get a 66ft cable to work. Maybe with DV, but not DVCProHD where the datarate is higher and timing crucial.

For the sake of reliability I would record on P2 cards and offload them to a laptop with a PCMCIA/PCCard slot. You can copy the card contents to one or more external hard drive or even a RAID array.

You can also record directly to a hard drive using FCP, HD Monitor or Scopebox, but if the cable gets jiggled, you're going to lose material. The same is of course true if you record to a Firestore.
 
Thanks THoff for the heads up. The only issue here is that we're shooting with the HDX900 with doesn't have any P2 slots. It does have a firewire out. If a 66ft firewire won't work and no P2 option then whats the next best option? Firestore?
 
The longest Firewire cable permitted by the IEEE 1394 spec is 15 feet / 4.5 meters. If you can find a place for your computer or a Firestore within that range of the camera, you should be good.
 
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