I don't see these replacing tapes just yet. For one thing, you need to archive the footage anyway so having the tape done at record time is good. Otherwise you'd have to dump the drive to tape later. It's actually a time saver to record on both simultaneously.

Furthermore, if you want your clips started and stopped with the camera trigger you'll need to roll tape. And you really do want the timecode as well as the time of day code.

One feature the Sony product has is an 8 second buffer. This allows you to record the 8 seconds of action before you pressed the trigger. Great for sports.

The drive is over $900.00 and spare 3hr batteries are another $90.00 each. You might also add some other mounting bracket than the hot-shoe. So you've really got to know where this saves you money.

The money savings is in transfer time. It'll be way faster to dump the footage onto your edit system from the drive than it will be from tape. And you'll want to dump it-why would you tie up a $1000.00 asset for the duration of an edit?

Other things to consider are:
--Is it waterproof? True, you aren't going to stand in the rain without protection but things still get splashed on rainy days.
--How shock resistant is it really. Things get dropped. (Especially off moving platforms) Is there a way to attach a leash?
--Are there strain reliefs for the cables? You want to be damn sure you can't kick out the cable.
--How long will the drive last before it gets noisy. My laptops have held up for maybe a year and a half.

All in all though, this looks like a great drive. It would be the perfect thing for all day conferences and seminars where you've got hours and hours of footage to capture. Imagine three cameras at a seminar, 18 hours of footage total, for 3 days. That's 54 hours of transfering if you use tapes. Obviously these would save you tons of person/hours.

This is where direct to disk recording really pays off. 54 hours of tape is a lot of tape changes so you can't just run the transfers overnight. You have to be there. If you have a single system it'll take all week. But then, if you have this big a project you should have several systems. Spending $3000.00 for three of these won't be your biggest expense. So, the bigger the job, the more these make sense, and the less they cost relative to all your other needs.

For seminars though, you could do the same thing with a laptop and a 200GB drive-if the software existed.

Rob Mack

Rob said pretty much what I was going to say. This particular system will not replace tape any time soon. First, and foremost, it's simply not cost effective. I can buy a load of tape for $1000! Over 83 hours of tape to be exact! Once shot, it's already archived. For those doing this on a professional or even semi-professional basis, this product simply isn't ready for primetime.

J--

Reading through before I read your last sentence Rob I was thinking "What about laptops at seminars?"

Software? - Vegas - you can capture direct to HD right now, and use tape at the same time if you want.

Peter,
you're right on the money. And the thing that puts me off all these disk capture gadgets is the drive is formatted as FAT32 and whilst I can't speak for this unit the Firestore seems to drop frames as it cuts over from one file to the next.
The other thing I worry about is the procession effect. Whilst a gyro stabilized camera might seem attractive it can be a bit disconcerting depending on which way the drive is mounted on the camera.

Okay, I'll address some of this.

Would a 2.5" disk drive have any noticeable gyro effec? I kind of doubt it.

Cost? it's a relative thing. The reason I brought up seminars was that my shop had bid on precisely this sort of thing. The biggest cost for us was capture time since it would tie up employees and edit systems. We didn't get the job-we bid about 12k and the winner bid about 10k. The thing is, it would have been a recurring job and although the first round would have eaten up that 10k in new gear, the next round would have been very profitable. So you've got to look at the bigger picture - these disk recorders could have paid for themselves on the first job. (The job called for rendering to wmv files. Our shop is Media100 and 844-except for me. Because we don't work on PCs nor in DV, the whole thing was way too cumbersome. It was kind of sad for me because they really could have done the job in Vegas)

News shooting is also a good scenario for these. The cost is small relative to the time savings.

But, yes, they're too expensive for a lot of scenarios.

Now, about using a laptop to digitize as you shoot. Yeah, it can work, but you can't start and stop the record process by pressing the record button on the camera. It's not as slick as the disk recorder. But I don't see why it couldn't be programmed.

You could run all the signals back to a central location and have an engineer start recording manually though. If you could use 1394b you could even have a nice long cable run from the camera to the truck.

Anyway, I didn't mean to pour cold water over the idea of disk recorders. Just wanted to try to temper the "irrational exuberance".

rob mack