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Topic: Connecting a portable hard drive (Read 1828 times)
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Alan Dague-Greene
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(See this thread for what got me thinking about this.) I just looked into a portable hard drive for recording directly from the camera, and they seem to be very expensive. For me, prohibitively so. I'd like to find out what other options are out there, possibly rig something from an existing hard drive, or even a hard drive-based camcorder. It sounds like hard drive-based camcorders are doing some kind of encoding as part of the process; the JVC models record as MPEG-2. At the moment, I'm interested specifically in HDV, which is MPEG-2, but it would be best to keep this discussion as wide as possible. Certainly, for the portable hard drive capture devices, there is some kind of operating system involved that allows the footage to be captured. An off-the-shelf hard drive does not have this. But would it be possible to provide some mediator between the camera and a standard hard drive? If anyone has any ideas or comments, please chime in! |
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Logan Groover
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Bella Corp is coming out with the Catapult, which is supposed to be under $300 dollars... and then you can get a decent 80 gig HDD for $100 or just use your ipod. Check it out... www.bella-usa.com |
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cosmin rotaru
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the Catapult stuff sounds like a nice ideea. If they get it out and under 300, I'm buying!  |
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MikkoWilson
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Alan,
The veriou hard drive recorders - like the Firestore - don't actully do any encoding. All teh encoding is done in camera and sent out as a video stream from the firewire port. A DV camera sends out DV, a HDV camera sends out HDV, and your HVX sends out DVCPRO-HD.
Now this data stream can't be recorded to any old dumb drive, they are no more than a disc with built in motor and write heads. You need somethign to control the hard drive.
And that's what these hard drvie recorders do. They take in the video signal over firewire and packege it into a dat storage bundle and write it to the hard drive. Some use a built in hard derive, like the curent range of Firestores and the Citidisc. Others are jsut a controller that allow you to use a seperate (swappable) hard drive, like the Catapult and the original FireStore-1
Eventually we will have cameras with this driver built in so that you can skip teh middle man and just record directly to a external drive. The closest to this is the HVX which can perform a card dump to a drive directly connected, but not while shooting.
- Mikko
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Alan Dague-Greene
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Hi Mikko, No offense intended whatsoever, but this is a rather old thread, and I've learned a lot since I posted. I am on the Cineporter list, after all. This is still good info for anyone with a similar idea in mind. The Catapult does look like a good alternative to the Firestore. |
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cosmin rotaru
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Well, Alan, I reopened the discusion... But if you gathered more info on this, I'd like to know more. I lost contact with the new technologies the last months... I know Firestore solution and the like are very expensive. If you know some solution under 300, I'd like to know about it! Thanks!
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Bob Hill
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A side note/question to the hard drive systems is how are people routing the firewire connection on there rigs. I ended up modifying some firewire connectors and incorporating them into my sled but I am curious as to what others are doing to accomodate these hard drives. Also, does anyone know of any commercially available rigs that support firewire connections on their sleds? Just curious.
Bob
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Tom Wills
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Nope, no sleds with Firewire. None of the true commercial rigs have anything more than Video, sometimes HD-SDI on a few rigs, and component on a few rigs, and of course power and sometimes Tally.
Mikko told me how to operate with cables going from the top to bottom of the sled outside the post, it's to have them taught from the topstage's front to the top of the monitor. That'll allow for you to not let them get in your way. Plus, most ops just put things like that on the top, velcroed to the camera.
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-Tom Wills
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Alan Dague-Greene
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Cosmin, I don't have any further info on cheap hard drive systems. When it becomes available, I am purchasing the Cineporter, which is made for the HVX and is not cheap. The Firestore has had mixed reaction, and Catapult isn't out yet, I think.
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Joe Sanders
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Do any of these opperate on 12 volts?
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If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves....
Thomas Edison
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Tom Wills
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The Firestore does. The Cineporter might, but I'm not sure.
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-Tom Wills
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John Damberger
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There should be a linux guru out there that can write a mini script to a flash card that can convert firewire video signal out to firewire signal in so that the hard drive can record it. an intermediate flash music pod may have enough to do it, but I'm not the guru in this, I just think it should be that simple, fill a hardrive plug another in keep shooting. I'm not looking for a bunch of bells and whistles. One high uncompressed raw format recorded. new file for everytime, I press record, I'm not even worried about filling the harddrive up, thats what a stop watch or internal tape counter is for. I'll switch the hard drive out if I think its almost full.
Send me links
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