Long-time capture - need advice

[Al_and_Joe]

Hello to everyone.

Glad we found this excellent forum. Sadly, we are absolute beginners in terms of technical issues. Yet we plan to shoot with several HVX200s simultaneusly. Please don´t comment on that, we know it´s way above our heads, hehe

Our plan is to use at least 4 HVXs on a basic set. The shoot will be around 1 to 5 hours. This limits the possibilities of recording, so our first idea was to stream the digital footage directly to an external HDD via Firewire. Then we read through many threads around here and came to the decision to rather use a PC or Apple Powerbook. Now, we are still in planning and preparation stage, so it leaves us some time before we have to reach a definitive solution. Our questions are:

1. How much data is generated using 720/24P streaming ("native" - no compression)? We figured out that is has to be something around 1 GB per minute... ?

2. Which other prerequisites are there in order to directly dump the streams? I.e. which software is needed for a PC or an Apple? What combinations can you recommend?

3. Are there any other possibilities of direct HDD recording WITHOUT using the expensive Firestore device?

4. What are your experiences with long-time recording, are there backdraws?

Alright, thanks for your help in advance...

regards from

Al & Joe

 

[bbalser]

For a Mac, FCP. Or you can just get QuickTime Pro for $40 or so and capture directly into it without FCP.

Problem with captureing directly in QTPro is that if you use any progressive recording mode, it will give you unusably blocky images. If you use any interlaced mode (even 1080i), it will give you a nice clean shot.

So if you're doing broadcast and only shooting interlaced, you can just use QTPro. If you're needing to shoot progressive frames, and/or edit, FCP.

 

[Al_and_Joe]

Thanks BenB, for your infos.

We will have to see, which formats are applicable to our needs, but as we went deeper into the subject, we found many more threads which help me in our plans.

By the way, FCP means Final Cut Pro, right?

Looks like our initial thoughts were right and we can possibly record for hours straight, when we hook the HVX into a second FW-card of the MacBook and use its built-in FW to connect to an external FW-drive. That would be perfect!

We´ll get back to this thread once we have come to play with our first HVX, so thanks again.

Regards,

Al & Joe

 

[Al_and_Joe]

It´s us again.

Now that we got more into the technical details, we´d love to get some more answers/recommendations. So, we get back to our initial questions and add some more:

1. How much data is generated using 720/24P?

Ok, we read elswhere that it´s roughly 1 GB/min with 1080/24p and about 400 MB/min with 720/24p. Is that correct?

3. Are there any other possibilities of direct HDD recording WITHOUT using the expensive Firestore device?

We are still not sure, because someone wrote he had an external FW-drive strapped to the cam, along with a custom-built battery pack, so is this really possible? If so, which formats can be recorded? We will need high definition for a 35mm-conversion...

4. What are your experiences with long-time recording, are there backdraws?

Luckily, the german reseller for Focus is residing nearby, so we will be bothering him for every tiny detail of the FS-100 issues.

Still, we would like some advice on long-time recording. We will have to use two different setups, one with the Firestore for mobile shots and one static setup , preferrably with a MacBook and FCP. Any serious troubles ahead?


5. What recommendations can you give for archiving? A large fileserver and additional tape backups with an LTO-drive is what appeals to us... Good idea?

Thanks again for your help,

Al & Joe