DV to Disk without a laptop ?

[Giroud Francois]

that is the problem with electronics devices.
when you take the raw price of each element, it hardly sums to the sale price of the device.
The problem doing this kind of calculation is you forget the salary of people designing, selling, building, supporting the product, plus the price of investment (building rental, travels, copyrights and licenses...)
Imagine that some customer would you pay a wedding shoot only few dollars, arguing that this is the price he can get for a DV tape in a supermarket ?

So, if somebody is smart enough to put a 100$ 500gig drive on a 20$ chip, running a free version of some linux OS, and be nice enough to share this for free, yes there is an hope.
But if you are like me, if i would build such marvel and know it is a valuable thing than many people wants, there are chances you will try to get rich by selling it NOT for cheap.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Dana Salsbury

There is software that can do it.
There is hardware that can do it.
But nobody can put it together for under $1,500?

Easy: just buy yourself the cheapest laptop you can find with a firewire port and then get any inexpensive editing program which can capture a live signal from the camera via firewire. (This assumes your camera has a live output from its firewire port.) That's probably not much cheaper than buying a Firestore drive, but you get a free laptop as part of the deal.

[Shawn McCalip]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Easy: just buy yourself the cheapest laptop you can find with a firewire port and then get any inexpensive editing program which can capture a live signal from the camera via firewire.

This sounds like a good idea, but those cheap laptops make me cringe... Most low-end laptops have incredibly slow processors that would probably choke just from pointing a camera at it! They're also loaded with minuscule amounts of memory that's shared for video processing. On top of all that, the hard drive you would record on will most likely be a dismal 4200rpm drive. You might get lucky with a 5400rpm drive for a few bucks more, but even those are kind of iffy when it comes to ingesting video. In the end, you would probably find yourself spending about a thousand bucks on a laptop. If you're going to spend that much it wouldn't be that big of a deal to tack on a couple hundred dollars more and get the Firestore or something similar. At least then you'll know what you're getting in to!

Another 2 cents in the cup...

[David Suthers]

It is possible to do this for well under $500. The processor can be as lowly as a 400MHz Pentium III. That is exactly what my thread "Homemade Direct-to-Disc on the cheap" is all about. I used an old tablet which was much harder to set up than a laptop would be. The important things would be the RAM (256MB minimum) and a good battery because you'll be replacing the hard drive with a larger capacity model anyway. Remember DV takes about 13GB of space per hour.

I've captured at over a terabyte of video (70+ sporting events) using my tablet. I won't go back to tape alone, although I still run tape as a backup. The ease of creating DVD's directly from the tablet hard drive over a network is very handy.

The latest version of Ubuntu was extremely easy to set up. If you're familiar with setting up windows software, you could do this in few hours. As a matter of fact, I'm posting this from a Ubuntu box. But don't think that I'm one of the Linux zealots as I spend way more time in the Windows world.

I'll be glad to answer any questions anyone has if they want to do this.

David

[Ed Khang]

I'd use an old Tablet PC, or an touch screen UMPC. Put it in a bump case where you have access to the screen, that way you can wear it over your shoulder, tethered to your Cam in your hand.

Kind of reminds me of old school "portable" camcorders with the tape transport in a shoulder pack, and camera tethered to it.

-Ed