I"ve been doing a little bit of reading on these drives and so far i've gathered that its mostly SD friendly, the HDV friendly models are yet to come out, correct?

Anyway, this approach seems really great, especially when i've recently shot pilots with around 20 tapes. Capturing on a deck was a lot of work/time wasted. And now that theres a possibility that the pilot might sell to a good network, i'm thinking about investing in these drives.

THey look great to me, but i woudl like to know from the vets, whether there are any chance of loss of medias, or file corruption etc problems that are associated with these? In other words, how reliable are they? Keep in mind, we will have high end laptops and portable ext hds for backing up the footage (with us), but we won't have a laptop on field with us. So we'll be only be to check the shot media once we're back home. Is there a way to check right on the spot whether the files were written correctly on the HD at the spot? ps feel free to forward me to any link etc related to all this info. Muchly appreciated.

oh and i'm shooitng mostly SD at the moment, but this question stands for both HD and SD.

Thanks guys

Hi Spike,

I have had a fair amount of experience with the FS-4 D2D device. It is not perfect, but pretty reliable. I personally wouldn't trust it enough to record without a tape in the camera. You can check if a shot has made it onto the HDD by switching the camera into VTR and pressing the PLAY key on the FS-4. If the clip appears in the camera's EVF then it is on the HDD and most likely not corrupt.

I hope that this is a help. If you want more detailed information check the Focus sub-forum.

thanks for the info, i just found out about the ability to use both tape and the ext hd at the same time. I think thats a marvellous feature to have, and will probably opt for it now, as the backup feature can't be beat!

I'll check out the focus sub-forum more, thanks again!