Thanks for your reply. I will try playing the files directly from the HD in WMP as you suggested. This will tell me if it's Vegas or FireStore, right? Excuse my ignorance, but what is "shooting with handles"?

Perhaps these will give you some clues:

http://www.focusinfo.com/support/faq/firestorefaq.htm

http://www.focusinfo.com/products/firestore/compatibility.htm

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=3&q=http://www.guygraphics.com/reviews/firestore.html&e=7421

John

'Shooting with handles", leaving a bit of video before and after the action starts / stops. I've had people try to hit the record button during the last syllable of a speach. In the process the camera is bumped enough to be noticeable and you cannot cut that out without lossing the last bit of audio.

Also a lot of consummer types don't realise how long it takes a camera to go into record.

Sorry, pet peeve of mine, tape is cheap, reshooting is expensive if not impossible.

I'm not exactly a "consumer type" as I have been shooting video professionally for over 18 years; and if you had paid careful attention to the post, you would have seen that there was no "tape" involved. The FireStore/harddrive combo was started 10 minutes before the concert and stopped 10 minutes after the concert ended. So how do "handles" apply to my problem?

jerryd:

I believe the term "tape" is interchangeable with your application/usage (kind of like "record" and "cd" ;) ).

I'm confused - In your first post, you mentioned that you had "There were 17 files of just over 9 minutes each on the hard drive", implying (to me, and apparantly to farss) that there was a series of "stops" and "starts" in order to create these individual files. Yes?.

In your last post you indicate that "The FireStore/harddrive combo was started 10 minutes before the concert and stopped 10 minutes after the concert ended". How are the individual files created if the Firestore combo was running continuously? Or is this a 2GB file limit issue?

Frenchy

Thanks, these were very helpful.

"In your last post you indicate that "The FireStore/harddrive combo was started 10 minutes before the concert and stopped 10 minutes after the concert ended". How are the individual files created if the Firestore combo was running continuously? Or is this a 2GB file limit issue?"

Yes, frenchy, the FireStore uses Fat32 files, so it is a 2GB limit issue. It creates a series of 9 min plus files that are seamless in their playback. There was no starting and stopping. As indicated, I started the drive about 10 minutes before the concert and it ran continuously for the full 2 hours. It's an 80GB HD, so there was plenty of room to do this. When I lined the series of files on the Vegas timeline, there was a 2 second gap in the audio (video continued to play) at the very end of each file.

jerryd,
ah yes. I'd forgotten about the FAT32 issue with the firestore.
This isn't going to help in this situation but I think you can runit with a NTFS volume. We'd used FAT32 so we could also use it with FCP but I think yu can also run it with NTFS so that would get around the split files problem.

Now I think this thing also keeps some form of table to tell it which bits makeup one whole video and then numbers the files sequentially.

Also it will record in AVI 1 or AV I2 from memory as well as mpeg encode if you want. I guess if you can play the video back from the drive with no gaps like it was a tape then all the data must be there. At a pinch can you not hook it up to the PC and capture from it like it was a VCR, hopefully this will get around the issue. Not an ideal solution to be sure as it defeats one of the reasons for using the thing in the first place.

Perhaps some of the data in the directory is incorrect so VV or even Windoz thinks the files are a bit shorter than the really are or is it that you get the whole of the vision but when you butt the files together there is a gap in the audio? Could this be an unlocked audio issue, in other words is all the audio there but its slipped in time?

Sorry I'm not really much help as I don't have one in front of me to try and the tests we did with it were a long time ago, I know we had to get the firmware in the thing updated at least once.

"or is it that you get the whole of the vision but when you butt the files together there is a gap in the audio? Could this be an unlocked audio issue, in other words is all the audio there but its slipped in time?"

Yes, that's it: when I butt the files together, there are 17 gaps in the audio, one at each end of the 2GB files. Not out of sync, so I don't think it's an unlocked audio issue. I sent the FireStore back to Videonics about a year ago for firmware updates also. Are you sure you can reformat for NTFS, because the Website FAQ and also the owner's manual says will not work with NTFS. Did you, in fact, try that and it worked? That surely would solve the problem in the future. The only thing I can think of at this point to solve the current problem is to stretch the audio in vegas out an additional 2 seconds to match the video length. I haven't tried it yet, but will today. Do you think stretching the audio 2 seconds in a 9 minute clip will be noticeable? Thanks again for your interest and help. The FireStore is a really neat concept, if I can get all the bugs worked out.

My reason for interest in it is the hire company I work for bought one, we also thought it was a very neat idea. I even went to the extent of building a power supply unit for it so we could run it and the drives off gel cells so I had put quite a bit of effort into the thing.

Everyone but myslef and the boss thought it was flaky because back then FCP had issues reading AVI files or something. I'm pretty certain I bought one of the drives home and reformatted it as NTFS and had it running on the firestore, Stopped the MacLanders from whingeing if I remember correctly. I don't think 2 secs in 9 minutes will be in the least bit noticeable except where the break is you'll be 2 seconds out of sync wont you. You'd be better off stretching from the 4.5 minute mark both ways, that should reduce the effect. Even doing that though leaves you with a 2 sec jump in the audio which depending on what it is will not sound too good. To answer your question though I'm not 100% certain it will work with an NTFS drive but I seem to recall the manual saying IF you used a NTFS partition then Macs couldn't read it. This was over a year ago so my memory could be failing me or else they've changed the forware so it doesn't.

Just as an experiment, have you tried capturing from the drive via the firestore, by that I mean treat it like a VCR. Maybe that will cure the problem. Even if it fixes it it's still a pain in the butt.

I suspect something like this is going wrong. VV is a bit of stickler for standards. Ah, is this the answer! There's a switch in VV that says Relax AVI specs or something to that effect, maybe that will cure the problem. You see I suspect the Firestore is so busy when it hits the 2 Gig mark creating a new file and not loosing any data maybe it runs out of time to update a header or something like that. So VV says this is how much audio you're telling me is in this file so this is all I'm going to look at even if there is 2 secs more of it there. Maybe if you turn that switch off it will 'see' your missing audio.

Hope something here helps or at least provides a clue. You could also try joining the files using something like VirtualDub and see what that makes off it. You'd need to copy them onto a NTFS drive first.

I don't think Vegas is to blame, because when I play the files in Windows Media Player, there is still that 2 second audio silence at the end while the video plays on. I e-mailed Videonics and they are blaming my hard drive.

Jerry,
This sort of thing can become just one giant finger pointing exercise.
You said before you could playback from the Firestore and all the audio is there. Did I understand that correctly?

If that's the case then I don't see how the drive is to blame unless it simply isn't fast enough.

What I really want to know is what happens if you use VV to capture from the drive, you shouldn't even need to actually capture to HDD, just use VidCap to play out from the drive. If it plays back over the join without loosing the 2 secs of audio then it's definately in the file, it's just been written in a way that only the firestore understands.

As I said before you could then capture from the firestore rather than just copying the files from the drive to the HDD.

It's worth a go, it'll narrow down where the problem is.

"You said before you could playback from the Firestore and all the audio is there. Did I understand that correctly?"

No, actually, they won't playback properly from the FireStore either. A strange new problem occurs when I try to play them back from the FireStore: after about 3 minutes of normal playback, all of a sudden, the audio drops out completely for the duration of the 2 hours. On the VV timeline, the full 2 hours of sound is there except for the 2 seconds of silence at the end of each clip. Also, I can pick any one of the 17 files and play them back in Windows Media Player and all have the 2 seconds of audio silence at the ends of their clips. I don't think there's any doubt that the problem is how the files were recorded by the FireStore. And since it is at the END of every 2GB file, my guess is that it has something to do with how the FireStore tries to make the seamless conversion from the end of one 2GB file to the beginning of the next 2GB file without losing frames (except, that it ACTUALLY DID lose frames, but only the audio, not the video). Does that sound to you like it could be the drive?