FS-100 vs Cineporter vs CitiDisk HD...?

Tom Lowe

Tom Lowe

Well-known member
I spoke with Chris Wang at Shining this morning about the CitiDisk HD. Chris is a PR/marketing guy , not technical. He said they were expecting delivery of the CitiDisk HD hardware this friday, and then plan to test the devices for a week before turning them loose on a waiting list of over 100 people.

Chris said that one difference betwee the FS-100 and the CitiDisk HD is that the CitiDisk does not have an LCD display. I wonder how this affects the modes it can shoot in? Chris did not have detailed info about the CitiDisk's ability to shoot in various formats/frame-rates.

My concern about the FS-100 is that if I buy one, I'd really be putting all my eggs in one basket for this movie shoot, and if the device breaks down, my movie would come to a halt.

When exactly is this Cineporter device supposed to be ready? I need to figure out a solution for storage for the feature within about the next ten days.

Thanks for any advice or information.
 
Yeah, I just spoke with Andrew Hoffman there, and he said the CinePorter won't be available until the third quarter of '06, which could be as late as September. So, for me, the CinePorter is not an option.

For those willing to wait, it looks like an amazing product. With the 300+ gig version, you can record 24pn footage for something like 800 minutes!

It's beginning to look like my only option is the FS-100.
 
Tom Lowe said:
My concern about the FS-100 is that if I buy one, I'd really be putting all my eggs in one basket for this movie shoot, and if the device breaks down, my movie would come to a halt.
Click to expand...

With all due respect to all involved, I think it would be completely foolish to trust an entire film production to an unreleased-never-tested product like the CitiDisk, and with all the questions/complaints/issues about the FireStore, I wouldn't use that either.

If you're going through all the efforts to make a movie, getting all the people together and spending all the dough and everything else, then you owe it to yourself to make sure that your workflow works.

The only thing you should be looking at right now is P2 cards. Buy a couple of 4-gigs, and sell them when you're done, and your net "rental cost" will end up being maybe $5 or $10 per day.
 
The four-gigs cards will be next to useless for us, as we are shooting extended scenes up in the mountains and out in the deserts and can't swap constantly. The 8-gigs cards would be alright, but they are expensive, and only offer 10 minutes of shooting overcranked at 60p. I think in order to shoot the way I want to shoot, I would probably need three 8-gig cards. That's $4,200, just for the cards. Is it worth it?

Believe me, I have thought about it.

I did speak with Matt at Focus today, and he assured me that we could make arrangements so that a backup FS-100 would be on standy ready to ship out overnight to us in the field if our FS-100 breaks down. Yes, we would lose a full day of shooting, but at least it would not be a fatal blow to the production.

You have to admit that being able to shoot 100 gigs of data at a time is very tantalizing.
 
Tom,
I own the FS-100 and I agree with Barry as well...The only way I will use it is with the p2 cards at the same time...Especially in a hot humid environment, it is fragile...Even when you first unwrap it there is warning about humidity...I live in Miami...It is not very rugged and even in a studio setting I've had issues...(dropouts, noise when it heats up) on 2 occasions lost footage with a jump in timecode...I can rent 2 8 gig cars and a p2 store near me for 350 a week...your production is certainly worth more than that, and the p2 store has been flawless for me so far...now the firestore is more convenient when it works and saves time in the edit, but there is no way I would trust it as a single source for storage...just my .02...Good luck up there in them there hills...
 
When are the 16GB cards supposed to be coming out?

Right now I am thinking I will go with one of these two options. Which sounds best?

Three 8GB P2 cards

or

One FS-100 and one 8GB P2 card
 
I'm looking forward to the CinePorter. It's going to have RAID 1 capability. I trust my footage to that. :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
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