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Posted by Ryan Boni on 03/15/07 03:38
On Feb 7, 9:45 pm, "Gary Eickmeier" <geick...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> I don't see this talked about much, but it sure has become a problem at our
> studio.
>
> Our Sony VX-2000s are starting to be less reliable in the tape mechanism, in
> particular with sound dropouts, even at SP speed. Usually we can hear the
> sound in analog playback from camera, but upon capture of the digital stream
> there are serious dropouts. The problem seems to stem from the tape path,
> because it gets worse with the 80 minute tapes or at LP speed. We used to be
> able to go LP all day long with no problem, but now we have one camera in
> for repair to check tape path and the other two are starting to exhibit the
> same bad habits.
>
> We are thinking of going with the Firestore FS-4 hard drive recorder to
> bypass the tape altogether. Of course, then you still have to come up with a
> way to archive your work. Perhaps with Blu-Ray disc recorder?
>
> Just thinking out loud, wondering what your experiences are in this. Anyone
> else have the Firestore? For the same reasons?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gary Eickmeier
Hey Gary,
We have two of the camera mounted Firestores (FS-3 on the back of our
Sony DSR-250 & a DR-DV5000 on the back of our JVC DV-5000) and they
work wonderfully well. I've seen the FS-4 at work on freelance gigs
I've done and I've yet to hear any complaints. Overall, the
Firestores seem to be pretty solidly-built devices. Since you're
talking about LP recording, it sounds like you're kind of in the same
boat we are. As I oversee a Public Access facility, a ton of what we
record are meetings, sporting events, concerts, etc., I wanted a way
to record long events without breaking the bank on tape costs on full-
sized DV tapes. The Firestores have worked great for us (after a
little bit of user training for my volunteers...people are so used to
hitting record to start and record to stop something, when you start
dealing with the drives, record just puts it in standby and you have
to hit stop a 2nd time at the end to have the last bit of the
recording write to the drive). I bought 2 extra 40GB drives (which
gives you almost 184 minutes of footage in .avi files, but the drives
have a few different recording formats you can choose) so that we
could swap around the 4 drives between the Firestores. I love being
able to pull the drive out and just hooking it up to the NLE via the
Firewire, and quickly and esasily just copying the files over (it does
create a group of little 9 minute video files on the Firestore).
After editing the thing and adding titles, it's a quick upload to our
playback server and we burn out a DVD archival copy. The tape cost
savings alone make it worth it. But the ease of use and the
elimination of real-time ingesting has made it impossible for us to
ever think about going back to tape.
Ryan Boni
Public Access Director
Peters Township Community Television
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