Tapeless Tech Research

I've been doing quite a bit of research on the subject of tapeless media via new cams coming down the pike or out there now and found the following links. Hope this helps a little.

http://www.abcdv.com/article/articleview/126/1/3
http://www.broadcastpapers.com/news/PanasonicSSM01.htm
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0405/halstead_nab.html
http://www.b-roll.net/NAB/main.html
http://www.dvformat.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=16958

Tons of info from NAB2004 http://www.abcdv.com/article/archive/87/

any tips on using a Powerbook in production?

anyone going straight to disk from the camera

or do you need a special product for this?

I'm PC based but I can just start my capture tool when my camera
is connected and start capturing as I would when capturing a
tape in the camera.

Try it out on your tools! I'd say they should work in the same
way.

Just wondering about this set up

Thanks
RB

I was at the IBC in Amsterdam yesterday to meet Matt McEwen and take a close look at the FS4 Prototype. All I can say is that I am very impressed. If the production FS4 is what the prototype promises it to be, then this device will shake-up the direct to disk market.

It promises to have all the functionality of the FS3, at a much lower cost. There are some things that I learned about the FS4 that I didn‘t see on its spec sheet though:

The FS4 has a two dimensional menu navigation scheme as apposed to the more linier menu navigation of the FS3. I think this is a big improvement.

The mini phono jack on the top of the FS4 between the two Firewrire ports is an input for a simple switch trigger. If I understand this correctly, this makes it possible to trigger the FS4 using a simple momentary switch. The potential of this function is somewhat staggering. This makes it possible to trigger recording on a camera that has been installed in a difficult to reach location, by means of a mechanical switch, or contact. This is useful for animation applications as well as for building video traps with the help of pressure contacts, light gates or motion detectors.

There is a mini phono jack on the bottom of the unit for the external power and charging cable. (My only suggestion to Focus is to make this power input jack a different one from the trigger input jack on the top of the unit.)

The FS4 can run off the Firewire power bus on Macs, but the battery won‘t be charged by it.

That‘s about it. The rest is in the speck sheet. Matt said the Pro version would run around 800 USD.

My suggestion to anyone thinking about investing in a direct to disk solution, is to wait until November or December for this product to become available, if they can. I think that those who buy a quickstream or Citidisk now, will be kicking themselves when the FS4 hits the market. I know that I am now glad that my experiences with the latter two products was so bad, because if one of them would have worked, and I would now own one, I would be kicking myself right now.

It was also a pleasure to meet Matt, kind of weird when the virtual world intersects with the real world.

Btw, Matt has an Australian accent.

thanks Chris for having made this site - it‘s not just fun.

Dont know if such a beast exists, but Im thinking along the lines of a Kona card with removable Harddrive all in a portable box with rechargeble battery to record HDV component

Hey all.
Just wondering if it were possible to capture dvcpro50 footage through the ibooks firewire?...

just a thought...

Are most people using something like a Pyro 1394DV for getting video into their PC via firewire, or the standard Motherboard FW ports, or generic FW PCI cards, or what?

Thanks,

Alex F

Hi there, does anyone know anything about the differences between the Firestore FS-4 and the Quickstream DV capture harddrives?
I like the idea of being able to capture using this method and then use fiewire to upload rushes onto my Mac but I also like the idea of having a few cameras recording at the same time and sending live feeds via firewire and optic repeaters straight to a digital mixer so I can mix on the fly!

If anyone has any information which could make a difference to what I would like to do it would help me immensley cuz at the mo they are looking pretty identicle? Is there anything I should be looking for?

Ian.

Anyone have experience with the ADS Pyro Drive?

http://www.adstech.com/products/API_820/intro/API820intro.asp?pid=API820

No experience with it, but it's the same basic drive as the QuickStream and CitiDisk (Shining makes it and OEM's it to the MCE and ADS).

Is it possible to record to the miniDV tapes and to the harddisk at the same time??? thanks in advance.

Definitely, if you're using an external hard disk recorder like the Firestore or an external hard-disk recording program like DV Rack.

Which is the best notebook for the canon XL2 to have (in realtime capture ) the best result possible ?
Is widescreen are good option ?
A notebook has $1000.00 is this a good thing ?
If yes ,which company ...acer ,toshiba ,lg ibm ...?
Thanks a lot !

What do you mean with "best" and "for the Canon XL2"?

What exactly do you want to do? Do you just want to edit? Do
you want to capture as well? Do you want to run DV Rack? Which
programs are you going to be using?

With DV work harddisk is most important (and I would go with at
least 512 MB of ram). There are some 7200 RPM harddisks available
in laptops these days, but most people seem to use external
USB(2)/firewire drives (I prefer drives who have both interfaces!)
for speed, flexability and storage space.

Of the many unique features that the Sony HDV camera has over other cameras (shot transition, overscan, etc...) Has anyone tried the new External Recording Control?

it's kinda cool

I turned the ERC on in the menu and used a 75' Firewire cable to plug a little Sony TRV17 minidv handycam camera to my Z1. I made sure the Z1 was downconverting the HD image. Then, I gave it a go...and it worked flawlessly. Everytime I hit the record button on the Z1, the little TRV17 camera began recording on its minidv tape as well. Everytime I hit the button again to stop recording, so did the smaller TRV17......all this, seventy five feet away. *smile*

This sure is a handy dandy way of double system recording your footage in DV to a backup MiniDV cassette if you want to. If I had a SOny Clamshell, I wold really be in business. *smile* it has two modes of operation as well.

Anybody else have any input on how they used this feature?

- ShannonRawls.com

Hey, that's really good information to know. Thanks! It's usefull if you are shooting a sit down interview and want to have a SD mini-dv version to hand off to someone. Very cool...thanks Shannon!

I've got a GL-1 that won't accept tapes anymore. Could I revive it by using a tapless HD etc. like firestorm or other setup?

Could I just use it as a camera hooked up to a Powerbook or other laptop?

I won't take tapes so will this stop me?

Thanks for your advice as I am a newcomer to all this.

Terry

Hi Terry,

I think that just about all of the D2D solutions on the market at the moment, should solve your problem of having a DV camera that won't tape. That was one of my initial reasons for looking into such a device.

The only disadvantage you will have with a camera with broken tape mechanism, is that you will have to probably start recording by pushing a button on the capture device rather than being able to use the camera's record button to trigger recording. Other than that, you should have no problem recording a Firewire DV signal from your "broken" camera.

Here is a link to a thread dealing with the problems of doing what you are suggesting using a powerbook.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22097

And DV Rack seems to be a good solution for Windows based laptops.

I hope this helps, good luck.

I was looking at this and it can record in MPEG4 and native AVI. You can get a 100GB HD in them.

Has anyone tried this or seen it in action?

http://www.archos.com/products/overview/av400_tech_specs.html

I saw a thread that mentioned this in Nov 2004 but not much else since.

This would most likely kill your quality:MPEG-4 SP with ADPCM stereo sound, near SVCD quality (optimised resolution for standard TV through composite video line-in) with up to 512x384 @ 30 f/s, in AVI format.SVCD quality is good, but not near original DV quality.

Near SVCD quality is worse. 512 x 384 is too low in my opinion
for any serious work.

On top of all this it only has analog in, so you are then going to do:

analog -> digital (CCD/CMOS chip) -> analog (s-video/composite) -> digital (archos)

With all sort of color space conversions and whatnot inbetween.

Hi guys,

I dealt hours with the issue, tried everything but could not resolve... My miniDV camera is JVC GR-D33AG & notebook is HP zt3000. I use Win Movie Maker to record video from my camera to the computer, using firewire. When i chose .wmv formats, the quality of the video is quite poor even if i choose "high quality" (but had no problem with audio). So I had to try DV-AVI. This time video was OK but audio was not recorded at all.

Could anybody help me with this issue?

Selim.

I saw this product advertised in a professional video and broadcast magazine here in Germany.

http://www.ffv.com/documents/MiniDVR_001.pdf

The recorded image is compressed, unfortunately, but I like it's design. It looks very solid and simple.

Seeing as it looks like a new HD version of DV Rack is looking likely, can I add my voice to that of the supporters of a flip/flop mode on the new version to accomodate the micro35 cinema lens adaptor and other similar non-image-correcting devices?

Perhaps anyone else who would find the function useful can chip in and we'll start an unofficial petition?!

This article on the Apple Web site might be of interest:

http://www.apple.com/pro/film/bigelow/

Concerns the production of “The Legend of Lucy Keyes” from disk to film.

I want to get the best possible setup for recording from a hdv camera to a hard drive. i edit on a mac. what is the best combination that you know of. i am shoping both for camera and drive, but the drive is what is causing me the greatest trouble. all advice is greatly appreciated.

peace
julian

I found the answer thanks to another site and user-- Firestore! this is the future of videorecording.

peace

disfasia

Doess anyone have experience of capturing clips on FS-4 and then exporting them as a Reference movie in Final Cut Pro? This question comes from a customer of mine. He says
I've tested .mov clips from the fs-4, and they don't export as reference movie. In fact, when the clip is imported into final cut pro 5, you get a 'this clip is not optimised for final cut pro. consider recapturing it', which is not good.
(Unless I am doing something silly. However, clips captured in final cut pro seem to export fine, it's just the fs-1/3/4 clips that are
problematic.)

The only difference I can see (between fs clips and regularly captured
clips) is when you look at 'Show Movie Properties' in QT Player 7 on Mac, the tracks are ordered as sound, tc, video. Normally the tracks appear as video, sound, tc. I dont know what the implication of this order is for the video file itself, but it suggests to me that there somehow is a difference (between fs clips and regularly captured clips).

Hi Robert,

I would suggest that you check your Final Cut Pro project settings. You should be selecting a PAL DV 48kHz project. We regularly check FireStore PAL QuickTime files in Final Cut Pro and have not seen a problem.

Contact our tech support group and they should be able to talk you through if you need assistance.

Best regards,

Matt McEwen

I have a unique situation and am looking for a small, battery powered DVD camcorder or recorder.

I'm asssisting a pilot-friend mount several helmet-cams on his plane. He'd like to record flights with passsengers, and hand them a DVD after the flight.

Does anyone have experience with, or know of a small DVD recorder/camcorder that will take an AV input? Run on 12Volts? I've looked at a couple of the Sony DVD cams.

Info appreciated.

Jeff Patnaude

What cheap SD capture solutions are available? I would like to record the SD footage in 4:4:4, RGB or RAW, in lossless or near lossless (well below 5:1) from the visual out (component, Svideo, video).

Thanks

Riley Harmon suggested in a previous thread, a possible solution for people having trouble getting M2T files into FCP5.

Here is a link:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/mpegstreamclip.html

I just thought it aught to have it's own thread.

Maybe this thread belongs in the same corner as General Magic's DV Rack, but on the other hand...

Has anyone got experience of vara software's products?

http://www.varasoftware.com

WireCast can take a few DV camcorder FireWire inputs, cut them together along with some DVE moves and record them to hard disk.

VideoCue does live chromakey, with vision mixer cues stored in a prompter script: as each cue passes as you read the script, the software does cuts, DVE moves and transitions to preset sources.

Both preport to record directly to hard disk.

Now, having played with the demos, I note that my 1.33GHz PowerBook 17" isn't studly enough. Has anyone else put this software to work on a G5?

Hello

I am interested in the different modes I can record direct to disk from video cameras, compressed and uncompressed. I have noticed claims that Firewire has video formats that are different than that of MiniDV's 25Mb/s. I have even heard of recording uncompressed from SD camcorders etc.

My question is, what are the different format and data rates of different video modes available over Firewire, and USB 2.0 . In particular, those sent by SD and HD video cameras.

Thanks

Wayne.

Hi !

It's to use with my xl2 ...i really need a HDD at 7200rpm speed (tapeless) with firewire connection ...for many reason !
100% compatible ...

Do you have some idea ?

thanks a lot

Daniel Limoges

Hi

I have been looking at the whole anddromeda thing for the DVX100 and am now considering buying the camera in order to get Andromeda fitted! It boasts 444 uncompressed aquisition. I have one big question though, hope someone can help.

I thought that uncompressed files were huge in size. But the Andromeda signal travels down a USB2 wire and is captured on a normal SATA drive, without a raid or anything? How can that be?

Normal mini DV is 25mbps, sure Andromeda must be in excess of 50mbps (easily)?

Thanks

Trevor

Hi all, I am with a church in Fresno, CA. We will soon be creating a remote video based venue that will allow alternate worship style, while still having the same sermon as our live venue. We will be shooting in HD (Sony HDR-FX1) and doing a wireless push to another building on the campus.

We would like the availability to time-shift the feed to allow the remote venue to start at any time after transmission. What we would need is at least two HD based DVR's (one on the transmission side for archival purposes and one on the reception side for re-broadcast). We might even need a third unit for redundancy purposes on the rebroadcast side.

I have some questions that I was hoping you might answer (hopefully leading to a purchase in the very near future). What I am most interested in is:

1) What card would you suggest for HD input?

2) Are there any HD cards that have HD capable inputs other than Coax for Antenna / Cable? All the cards I have seen (MDP-130 for example) only have SVid and Composite input. Ideally I would like component as well as HDV inputs.

3) What output card would be needed? Is there any card that sends out a direct video feed without the computer interface?

4) Does the speed of a 7200RPM IDE HDD allow for 2 HD feeds to be recorded at once?

5) How are files stored locally when they are recorded? As MPG-4?

6) If a standard DVD-RW is available, is there an easy way to transcode the HD feeds in REALTIME to SD for standard DVD playback?

Thanks for your time regarding these questions. I really appreciate it!!

G'day
I want to use a DTD device on my Sony Z1,
I will be using HDV tapes, but want to record on to the DTD in Pinacle AVI
to put into Liquid pro for editing, I would use the HDV tapes only for
archive.
It must be able to mount it on the camera

Any recomendations?
I'm going to IBC in amsterdam next week, I would like some advice
before visiting the stands.
Thanks

I videotape motorsports at some very dusty place. By the end of the races there is almost always a thick layer of dusty dirt on the camera. Would a dte be a good idea in a place like this?

Well, my camera ate yet another tape today, and this time, it's one too many.

I was considering getting a proper playback deck, but considering I'm shooting on HDV, I'm looking at $2000 for a deck... and I still have the potential for more eaten tapes. So, after looking at pricing, I'm thinking direct-to-disk is probably the way to go.

I have a few questions before I make the move, though.

First off -- I have two cameras -- a Sony FX1 for HD, and a JVC GY-DV500 for SD. I want to make sure I can record both HDV and DV with whatever solution I go with.

I'm editing on a G5 running Final Cut Pro 5, and I don't want to deal with the hassle of transcoding. I'm looking for drag-and-drop simplicity -- as in, I copy the files from the direct to disk recorder onto one of my G5's hard drives, and from there simply drag the files into FCP and start editing.

I've looked at the Citidisk HDV and the Firestore FS-4HD. My understanding is, the Citidisk records to an m2t stream which would need to be transcoded before working with. For the FireStore, my understanding is that if I get the FS-4HD Pro, I can record straight to a QuickTime file that FCP can read. Is this correct?

I guess the only other thing I'd ask would be... any comments regarding my situation? It seems that I've read tapeless is the wave of the future... the way to go. After losing this last tape, I'd have to agree... even when factoring in the cost of archival to hard drive, I'm still not looking at paying much more per hour of footage than I am now.

For those of you who have gone tapeless... has it worked well? Is it one of those "I'd never go back to recording to tape" situations?

Thanks for any advice! :)

Here's the way I see it...

I always film with tapes and when capturing to the systems, I use a dedicated deck. With regards to capturing HDV, I actually had the M10 deck but sold it and purchased a handful of the Canon HV10's - they're cheap, decent pocket camera for the family, and work just fine as a deck, and even if it breaks, I have a bunch more and it's still cheaper than a new, dedicated deck. You really shouldn't use your cameras, particularly if you're doing batch capture. If your camera is eating tapes, are you using many different brands of tape and/or is your camera properly maintained, and are you using good tapes or cheap junk you find in a local store on occasion.

As far as HDD recording, I've been using Nnovia drives for about 14-15 months and I haven't had any problems thus far. I have 2 80G drives and 1 100G model. They have performed flawlessly. They are a tad bigger than the competitors (Citidisk and Firestore) but on the mere basis that it's made out of a nice, sturdy metal casing, if it is dropped, there's no way it's going to break that easily. I have heard of several issues with CitiDisk models and I personally think the FireStore's are clumsy. I've tested these and never liked them too much.

I recently sent in all of my Nnovia drives for the free HDV upgrade that will allow them to capture m2t files and just purchased two of the newest models, which are HDV ready and have swappable hard drives - I got the 120G models for only $1900 each. Looking at the cost per gigabyte and the fact that the drives can be swapped out, and that they are very reliable (service is really good, too) I really do stand by these things. :)

I use these drives for every shoot that we do, dump the footage to external hard drives, and store the tapes as backup just in case. Until cameras are solely HDD-based, I will always do tape and drive recording. It's a cheap safety-net.

Hi, you may want to have a look at this thread
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=84702

this forum may have been a better choice for that topic than the "General HD/HDV Aquisition" forum; if a moderator can move the thread here I would appreciate it.

I know there's already been a lot of bad press about these things already but I've had a recent bad experience with mine that I thought I'd better pass along to warn others.

I bought a Citidisk HDV (the120 GB model—FW1256H-120) last October and have had lots of problems with it. It is poorly designed and very unreliable. For example, if you accidentally shut off your camera before you stop recording with the Citidisk (or if the camera battery goes dead or if the IEEE cable comes out) you will not be able to recover any of the footage that you've just captured on the Citidisk unless you send it back to the manufacturer (Shining Technology) and they're able to find the files with their special utility program. I shot a soccer game recently where this happened (i.e. I accidentally turned off the camera before I stopped recording with the Citidisk) and was unable to locate any of the footage when I later attached the Citidisk to my computer. I overnighted the device to Shining and they were able to locate about 40 minutes of the 60 minutes that I had shot, but unfortunately the other 20 minutes are gone forever. Worst of all, my camera tape had run out right when my client's team scored their only goal of the game (and this was also part of the missing 20 minutes on my Citidisk) so now I have to explain to my client why I didn't get it on video. Shining told me they would consider fixing this problem in the future but for right now it looks like all Citidisk owners will just have to learn to live with it. Incidentally, the Firestore FS-4 Pro that I own does not have this problem so I would definitely recommend buying a Firestore (or another brand) until Shining gets this fixed.

To summarize, here are my gripes about the Citidisk:

1. It loses some or all of your footage if something goes wrong.

2. It comes with a very poorly written owner's manual that’s difficult to understand and does not warn you of the problem mentioned above.

3. It has a battery switch separate from the main power switch that you have to remember to turn on and off each time you use it. Because the battery switch is very small and doesn't have a light to warn you when it's on or off it's easy to forget about turning it off in order to prevent wearing out the battery. They should have designed the Citidisk so that the battery powers up automatically when you turn on the main power switch (just like most other electronic devices) rather than having 2 separate switches.

"Veescope Live provides real-time visual feed back on a live video source connected to your Apple MacIntosh computer. Veescope displays real-time chroma key, and high and low video level Zebra patterns. It uses the computer's graphics card, instead of the CPU allowing for much better performance.

Veescope Live works with any Quicktime video input source, such as a DV firewire stream, or a high-definition video capture card. In addition, Veescope Live can display a waveform or vector scope directly on top of the video.

Veescope Live provides industry standard scopes such as, Waveform and Vector. Veescope Live overlays any scope directly on top of the video in order for you to locate problems with the video. The video underneath the scope is changed to black and white, in order to make the scope more visible."
This text was copied from the dvdxdv website:

http://www.dvdxdv.com/NewFolderLookSite/VeeScope/Products/VeescopeLive.overview.htm

Haven't tried it yet but sounds promising, for a fraction of the cost of some competitors.

I've been reading with great interest about these not so new Direct-to-Edit recorders and fully appreciate the improvement to my workflow if I buy the correct one.

I'm in PAL land and shoot 99.9% in 1080/50i with my Canon XH-A1s and edit in Vegas 7.0e. From what I understand having read quite a few threads, my options would be to buy either the Focus Enhancements Canon specific FS-C 100GB, or their 100GB FS-4Pro HD.

Given my inexperience with DTE recorders, I'm hoping folk can help me decide which one will best suit my needs by addressing the questions below.

1 Are there any larger single capacity DTEs available, e.g. 120GB?

2 How long does it take to change the reel folder in which you wish to record, e.g. from R0 0 TO R1 1?

3 What is the largest battery capacity available for the respective DTEs?

4 Which DTE has the most accessories?

5 Other than on the hot-shoe, what would be the best way to mount a DTE to a XH-A1?

6 Is it possible, or acceptable to mount a DTE to a pan handle?

7 Can a DTE be used straight out the box or does it need to be formatted and configured via a computer prior to use?

8 Are DTEs susceptable to frame drop like tape?

9 Is the voltage to the DTE power supllies 110~220V and 50~60Hz?


TIA
Neil

Hey check out the box I'm working on to record video directly from HDMI, or component for that matter to a small computer. HD, SD, whatever.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=97526

Chris

Hi everyone, a question for you all.

I have the multi-camera (2) sorted out, plugged in via firewire, no problem. My question is ......

Is it possible to send a wireless SD signal to the firewire on the computer so that we can get up on stage and have free range of moving about without dragging cables around.

Many Thanks for any ideas

Andy

I found one going cheap but I wanted to check - it's just data right? the Quickstream shouldn't care what type it is - I think?

http://www.mcetech.com/quickstreamdv/index.html

Hi guys,
I was wondering what people were having success with when capturing live to a computer. We were looking at the AJA, Black Magic and Matrox cards. There are times when we will need to record up to 10 hours of video (HD-SDI) , but we would like to record it post switcher. Is a very fast computer running with a HD Card and minimal software to bog down resources going to record sufficiently without dropping frames and getting messed up? What solutions have you guys been using to achieve a "live capture"? By the way, the stream would be a 4:2:2 or full 4:4:4.
Thanks in advance.
Kit

My dad was sniffing around and came across this Direct-to-disk 250gig DN-300 DV/HDV recorder from a DataVideo Technologies based in Taiwan. It's available as a special order product on B&H (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/532340-REG/Datavideo_DN_300_DN_300_DV_HDV_Recorder_Player.html), but it only has one review with two stars.

Product Specs here (http://www.datavideo.info/en/products/dn300.shtm).

I know it doesn't have a battery, but for 250gigs and 18 hours of footage, this has the possibility of being a good alternative to Firestore for the price.

I use a JVC HD110 that outputs HDV 720p. One thing that I'm not clear on about this and other Direct-to-disk recorders is if it will record this format or not. I know Firestore makes a special JVC version, but I guess I just like to have options.

I'm just looking for opinions and information from anyone who has used one, owned one, seen one, bought one and trashed it, owns it and loves it...