Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Recording Video Directly to a Hard Drive
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 01:00 PM
"FS-3's small size and rugged chassis have been designed to bring DTE Technology to your existing DV Camcorder. Featuring industry standard Anton/Bauer, V-Mount, PAG Lock or NP battery mount plates, you not only power FS-3 from your existing battery system, you conveniently mount FS-3 between your camcorder and battery on any full size camcorder featuring a DV input/output port! Now any DV camcorder used in ENG, field production, sports or event videography can easily be enhanced to include DTE disk recording capability!
FireStore FS-3 features a disk drive slot for the FSHDD-1 removable FireWire disk drive so you are not limited to a fixed, internal disk drive. It is also possible to daisy chain additional drives to the external 6-pin FireWire port, allowing ultra long record times. Power consumption is a low 7.5W preventing excess drain on your power source."
This is beyond the consumer/prosumer realm, but it represents what's now possible in high-end video recording, and like most technologies, I think we'll see this eventually come down the pipe into mainstream consumer cameras. If you think about it, today you can get 80 GB 2.5" hard drives made by Fujitsu. 80 GB is enough for just over six hours of DV-AVI quality footage (at 13 GB/hour). There are camcorders out there burning to DVD, but they use smaller discs with less capacity, and until they commercialize Blueray lasers and put them in these cameras, I don't think we'll see much in the way of capacity. Personally, if the hard drive was sturdy and I wasn't afraid of damaging it, I'd opt for a hard-drive based camera over a tape-based one. It introduces the problem of where to put that much video when you need to offload it and record more... ;-)
FireStore FS-3 features a disk drive slot for the FSHDD-1 removable FireWire disk drive so you are not limited to a fixed, internal disk drive. It is also possible to daisy chain additional drives to the external 6-pin FireWire port, allowing ultra long record times. Power consumption is a low 7.5W preventing excess drain on your power source."
This is beyond the consumer/prosumer realm, but it represents what's now possible in high-end video recording, and like most technologies, I think we'll see this eventually come down the pipe into mainstream consumer cameras. If you think about it, today you can get 80 GB 2.5" hard drives made by Fujitsu. 80 GB is enough for just over six hours of DV-AVI quality footage (at 13 GB/hour). There are camcorders out there burning to DVD, but they use smaller discs with less capacity, and until they commercialize Blueray lasers and put them in these cameras, I don't think we'll see much in the way of capacity. Personally, if the hard drive was sturdy and I wasn't afraid of damaging it, I'd opt for a hard-drive based camera over a tape-based one. It introduces the problem of where to put that much video when you need to offload it and record more... ;-)
