David Wanger
Member
I just finished shooting a feature length narrative with a FS-100 and found that sound of the cooling fan was a problem indoors. After about 20 minutes of operation the fan turns on in its low mode. The low mode doesn’t sound too bad, but the fact that it was audible at all was kind of deal-breaker for our sound department. Eventually the fan shifts into high gear, which is unacceptably loud.
I experimented with blimping the device, but this caused it to overheat rapidly, and also muffled the temperature warning alarm. Here’s a photo of the paperclip solution I came up with:
The way we used this was to always have it in place to disable the fan, and turning the entire unit off whenever possible too cool down. The remaining noise of the spinning hard drive was quiet enough to be acceptable, though every once in a while it would make clicking sounds. Out of about 5 long interior shoots, the temperature alarm went off on one occasion after around 3 hours of operation.
Ideally I would like to be able to manually control the fan modes, which would allow switching between no fan while shooting and the loud fan while not; the low fan mode still being utilized as is for exteriors. And an optional standby mode for the hard-drive would probably keep it from heating up so quickly.
Overall the Firestore worked wonderfully. A couple other issues came up though-
Using the quicktime modes, Final Cut Pro said that the resulting files weren’t optimized for FCP, but so far I haven’t had any out-of-the-ordinary problems with dropped frames.
Shooting in 1080 at one point I think accidentally had the HVX set to 24p instead of 24pA. This resulted in mysterious problems such as missing audio on about half the affected shots, and a missing field every 4th frame on all the affected shots. Luckily only a few takes were affected.
I experimented with blimping the device, but this caused it to overheat rapidly, and also muffled the temperature warning alarm. Here’s a photo of the paperclip solution I came up with:
The way we used this was to always have it in place to disable the fan, and turning the entire unit off whenever possible too cool down. The remaining noise of the spinning hard drive was quiet enough to be acceptable, though every once in a while it would make clicking sounds. Out of about 5 long interior shoots, the temperature alarm went off on one occasion after around 3 hours of operation.
Ideally I would like to be able to manually control the fan modes, which would allow switching between no fan while shooting and the loud fan while not; the low fan mode still being utilized as is for exteriors. And an optional standby mode for the hard-drive would probably keep it from heating up so quickly.
Overall the Firestore worked wonderfully. A couple other issues came up though-
Using the quicktime modes, Final Cut Pro said that the resulting files weren’t optimized for FCP, but so far I haven’t had any out-of-the-ordinary problems with dropped frames.
Shooting in 1080 at one point I think accidentally had the HVX set to 24p instead of 24pA. This resulted in mysterious problems such as missing audio on about half the affected shots, and a missing field every 4th frame on all the affected shots. Luckily only a few takes were affected.
