Just be careful of the Firestore, we have one and well it should be great BUT it'll only work with FAT32 drives and others have had issues loosing a few frames during the file transition. Nice thing about it, you get to use your own drives.

spot - thanks, that looks like just the thing. however a bit more expensive than I had in mind - do you know of anything cheaper?

oh, and it says in the pdf brochure that AV IN can be connected via a breakout - would this also allow connection of 2x external audio sources, such as mikes?

alternatively, any dv camcorders using hard drives rather than tape?

thanks :-)

You could marry up one of these 2.5" Citidisk PDF units with a slim external analogue to DV converter (ADS, Canopus etc).

You could record two mono audio sources, but both the analogue-DV and the DV-HD devices are single stereo audio only I believe.

There is both a 2.5" and 3.5" unit, google for "citidisk DV" for the best links.
Where you use a DV camcorder with one of these HD slaves, you might choose to still have a backup to tape running. This also stops the camcorder from being upset with having no tape in/not-recording and stops the camcorder from powering itself down.

The 20GB 2.5" unit with USB2 aswell is about US$120.
datavision.co.uk is where I fist saw these listed.
Can't speak for their quality but the price might be worth a punt.
Spots unit would be better of course. However I'd have thought that for $1400 it would also record uncompressed 4:2:2 from SVIDEO/composite and not just DV. 80GB is comfortably an hour of uncompressed, but then 2.5" drives probably have a job sustaining >22MB/sec across their entire area.

Quite a few pro cameras that have bolt on VTRs have a hard disc variant by the manufacturer or third party too.

Here is an MJPEG rack mount hard disc based VTR from Megagem/vidyo. DigiDeck by Fast Forward Video for MJPEG with Recon MJPEG VTR . This would be about the same data rates and although not as cunning as DV, it would give a better key with regular chroma keying tools. US$3500 and again stereo not multi-channel.

What I would make sure of if I were you is that you buy from a place which will let you return it if it doesn't work. And I mean ACTUALLY let you return it without restocking fees or some other BS. That also means 30 days not 7 or 14 days from the date you order it. Most of the "lowest price" stores (ie: New York City)hold up the order so that you cannot return it. Pay a little more and order it from a place which has a high reseller rating.
www.resellerratings.com
The reason I say this is because it sounds like the very type of device which may cause compatibility issues with other hardware and/or software.

John

You cannot just connect a a firewire DV resource to a firewire HD and expect a file to start appearing on the HD!
Thats why you need the Firestore or whatever to convert the raw DV data into a file, including writing the wrapper etc.

I agree farss. The Citidisk DV and the Fast Forward Video units are both VTRs. The Citidisk, is a budget version of a FireStore and even more of a budget version of NNovia.

If it wasn't for the poor audio, I'd have added that microdrive and 16x compactflash drives in general make good 640x480 30fps or higher in the few digital cameras that support them. (some Sanyo models going back 3 or 4 years and some recent Fuji units) - well they aren't remotely controllable and in the cast of the Sanyo, only do 5minutes at a time, irrespective of the media being 340MB or 1GB.

The 3.5" citidisk makes quite good sense if you are thinking of a firewire device. Makes it dual purpose with the right model of controller. Assuming the DV versions of these firewire appliances are as fast as the Oxford 911 chipset etc.

Check that PDF, the £80/$120 unit is able to write .AVI, .MOV and .DV files from your camcorder and it is a storage class firewire device.

Anyone have any experience with these Citidisk things? They look like nice little units. How are they with respect to dropouts, disk speed, etc.?

I notice a Citidisk DV Pro is coming out (www.shining.com) that will allow in-field clip marking and deletion. Looks sweet.

I've spotted them, and datavision.co.uk who sell them where I live are normally quite selective in what they deal in. Caveat emptor, like earlier, try to try something from a dealer who is prepared to put his chin on the block.

If they are great, then I'll take some credit for commenting ;-)