I look at these different tape-less solutions, like the firestores and the quickstream and wonder how they justify pricing. The basic fact is that it does two jobs, moving a data stream and giving it the correct file extension.
I want to look at the quickstream where the 6 hour version is $800, then the 9 hour version is $1000.
Is that to say that the difference in price from an 80gb to a 120gb drive is $200. For that money you get no extra benefits, they just throw one drive or the other into the thing. And if that's how they price drives based on size, does that mean the $800 you spend on the 6 hour version is $400 for a drive and $400 for the device?
How about they sell an empty one for $400 and let people put their own drive in.

Really, I'm very sorry. I just had to let it out. That all said, I'm going to be buying one, because I can't make one myself. It's a great idea; I just feel ripped off when it comes to the difference in drive sizes versus price.

But then, what I really love about this forum

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?p=822430#post822430

The home-brewers guide to swapping drives in a fs-4 pro

while you're reading that tutorial i wrote... you should check out the Tekkeon MP3450 battery.

The Tekkeon battery has volt adjustments from 5V-19V. At 12V, it just feeds the Firestore extra power while the firestore battery is being used. At 14V, it charges the device battery while you use it.

Here is a little secret! :)

I upgraded my 40GB - 120GB(tutorial above ^^). From 203mins to 610mins of recording time for just an extra $69 bucks. The firestore battery only gave me about 90mins or roughly 1hr 45mins before it started sounding the battery alarm. Attaching the Tekkeon battery got me all the way through to just 36mins left of recording time.

610mins-36mins = 574 mins.
9.5hrs straight!!! Thats how much juice i got from combining the firestore battery and the tekkeon battery(12V).

This was tested yesterday. I simply hooked the firestore to the camera, started rolling the record and left it there for 9.5hrs! Obviously the Tekkeon was plugged to the firestore. :)

think about it 9.5hrs!

your my hero!:)

The thing that bothers me is, I dont know about you guys but 40 gigs is plenty of storage for me. Its 4-5 hours and I id rather spend money on more drives at home for long term storage vs my shooting drive. Id much rather see the prices drop vs drives getting bigger.

I look at these different tape-less solutions, like the firestores and the quickstream and wonder how they justify pricing. The basic fact is that it does two jobs, moving a data stream and giving it the correct file extension.... It's a great idea; I just feel ripped off when it comes to the difference in drive sizes versus price.
You've left out the hardest and most expensive parts of making a hard-drive recorder - you also need an OS, what we used to call a DOS (disk operating system) to get files named, sorted, recorded on disk, a file allocation table (FAT) to keep track of where the file was laid down. This OS is going to be burned to a chip... but then don't forget the OS also needs to support a display and some buttons, and manage a firewire port.

Maybe a graceful powerdown sequence if power supply voltage gets too low, perhaps monitor the incoming data stream and buffer it so that if garbage starts coming in you save the file and start a new one...

Which is why you can't just plug a drive into the firewire port of your camcorder (please don't try it, burned ports are expensive!)

I don't mean to be an apologist for the manufacturers, I totally agree with you that certain manufacturers are charging way too hefty a premium for a larger drive.

I agree that there more to these things than a hardrive and a port. My thing is they have been making these things for years now and the price has'nt really come down that much instead of lowering the price they just make the drives larger. Based on what you just posted the harddrives are the "cheapest" part of the product but they raise the price expodentially and all they do is put in a 100 gig vs a 60. they are just using larger hard drives to justify the high prices.

Thanks Kalulu,

Glad to see there are ways to get things done other than throwing too much money at the problem.


Randy,

I totally agree with having plenty of hard disk space for file storage. I just happen to also be doing a lot of live event shooting and that sometimes requires a lot of continuous recording. I'll still be running tape, but this will cover my butt to have non-stop footage.
When I'm doing studio work, interviews, commercial spots, this will be overkill. It just depends on your needs for the job.

Seth,
I again agree with what you are saying here. If it was an easy solution to reproduce, we'd probably see a dedicated thread on the subject. I figure if you plugged a firewire HDD into a camera, it just wouldn't do anything rather than frying ports. Just the same I don't intend to try it.


My real point is that the drives are just too overpriced. If it were a simple 20-30% mark-up, I'd be understanding on some level. The fact that they cross over a 150% mark-up, just shows that they charge based on the fact that they are making a product for a historically overpriced market.

...My real point is that the drives are just too overpriced. If it were a simple 20-30% mark-up, I'd be understanding on some level. The fact that they cross over a 150% mark-up, just shows that they charge based on the fact that they are making a product for a historically overpriced market.
Well, I can't disagree with you there. The incredible prices that get you from 40GB, to 80, to 120(?)... when we as consumers can buy raw laptop drives for a fraction of the upgrade price does *not* generate much love for the manufacturers.

More competition, a bigger market, these things would help. Check out the concept CF recorder that Cineform posted in DVInfo (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=107885) and on their web site (http://www.cineform.com/products/CineFormRecorder.htm). A pretty interesting box, and quite a buy if they're able to stay to their target $1200 for an HDMI version. The next product after that would be SDI-HD. I don't know if they're going to announce/show at NAB, but I hope so.

I have to wonder - in a couple years will we be looking back on harddrive recorders with any affection at all? What will event videographers do in a solid-state world? I sure like using those 3hr. DVCAM tapes...

Man put a Firewire port on that vs HDMI and let it have a battery and sign me up. I think this is a a sign of things to come.

There isn't a whole lot of point to putting a firewire port on the Cineform CF recorder (if they ever market the device). Better to just record the HDV MPEG2, coming over the firewire, directly to a CF card (and convert to Cineform on your computer later, if desired). There's no quality advantage to transcoding MPEG2 to Cineform (on the fly while shooting) and the MPEG2 stream will take up much less space on the CF card (longer recording time).

I think we need to find someone who can program an fpga and work with PCBs and just get a device that translates the stream for recording to a usb drive and we can have something that's functional and easy to replace drives on.

Yeah 422 color space is nice, but I don't find a desperate need for it, since HDV has been working out for me.

Sorry, wanted to stay on topic. You might get what I'm saying though

I look at these ... and wonder how they justify pricing.

Prices are set to maximize profit. Sometimes that means low prices with volume sales, or loss leaders with high margin cross- and up-sells. But many times it simply means charging the maximum that the market will bear.

If you think disk-based firewire recorders price schemes are bad, wait until you try to sell a house. The standard fee structure is 7% of the home value, which obviously has little relation to the cost required to sell it. Does it really cost $63,000 more to sell a $1M home than a $100K home?

I think we need to find someone who can program an fpga and work with PCBs and just get a device that translates the stream for recording to a usb drive and we can have something that's functional and easy to replace drives on.

Yeah 422 color space is nice, but I don't find a desperate need for it, since HDV has been working out for me.

Sorry, wanted to stay on topic. You might get what I'm saying though

It's occured to me that it just wouldn't be all that tough (for somebody that knows what they were doing) to design a board to capture a DV or HDV stream from firewire, and record it to disk or flash memory. Once designed, it wouldn't cost squat to produce.

Flash memory really would make more sense nowadays. The cost of flash memory, with adequate bandwidth, has dropped dramatically, and should continue to plunge.

Flash memory really would make more sense nowadays. The cost of flash memory, with adequate bandwidth, has dropped dramatically, and should continue to plunge.

Heck, I'd take some IDE, eSATA, Firewire, USB. I just think a plain old bridge controller would be the bestest thing ever. If you could hot swap some flash cards--man that would be beautiful.

I wonder if you bought a Firestore (or other product that used SATA as the drive) If you could open it and just replace the hard drive with a solid state sata like this one.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/12/ocz_announces_super_fast_ssd_with_120mb_s_read_and_100mb_s_write_speeds/

FireStores use IDE drives. You should be able to pretty easily modify them to use a CF card, using something like this:

http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Pages/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm

Something like that would suck a lot less juice than a hard drive too.