Firestore drive issues, please advise!

G

goofs59

Member
Hello all, I am having a couple of issues with my FS-100 drive that I was wondering if anyone had some ideas on.

First the battery life is way too short, which is quite upsetting considering these things retail for around $1700. What is the best way to possible provide alternate power when needed? Usually I can get away with conserving and plugging it back in to charge while I use my p2 card, but this is not always practical. It's funny, I love this thing because people always complain about how expensive the format is but a spent a little over $1000 (p2 came with HPX-170) and have never used up all my space in any format. What ends up happening is that the stupid battery dies first. If anyone has some suggestions please let me know.

Also the one technical issue I have had can become a serious problem. Sometimes parts of my footage seem to just cut out. It will go from one shot and then blink with horizontal bars into a new shot. Sometimes when I capture the clips I get weird looping parts too, like it will cut out to a new part and then repeat that part at the end. Sometimes I suspect this being a connection issue but I wonder if it is more. Does this happen to anyone else? I have tried to use the repair clip function but am not very clear on how to utilize it best. Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks for reading!
 
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When I first started shooting with the HVX-200 I had a Firestore and these are the issues I faced:

-- Had to get a couple of larger batteries to make sure there was always enough power for the Firestore. Otherwise I had to wait for the Firestore to boot up, then turn on the HVX. With the Firestore constantly running I could start shooting in a lot less time. But it meant having to keep the Firestore powered up and that meant yet another set of batteries to worry about.

-- Sometimes the Firestore wouldn't stop when I tried to get the HVX to stop recording. And even worse: it wouldn't record when I needed it to start recording.

-- Always had to worry about the Firewire connection.

-- When shooting aerials in a helicopter, the vibration totally fouled up the Firestore. None of the footage was usable, and there was no way to really know that it was going that bad until after the flight.

-- My wireless system kept picking up RF noise from the Firestore. Tried all sorts of things including putting ferrite chokes on the cables to no avail. The only answer was moving the Firestore away from the wireless units, and that was impractical.


On the other hand, here's the issues with P2 cards: Cost and recording time.

Other than that, they were rock solid, reliable and didn't require any additional batteries, other than the P2 Store.
 
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