Posted by Rick Merrill on 12/06/05 15:22

Rayne wrote:
> Hi All, Im looking into picking up 4 FS4 for my travelling kit (3 DV
> Cams) To aid our 'conference' setup which often mean recording up to 6
> hrs of meeting footage per day for up to 2 weeks. This would mean a
> massive financial relief as the DV tapes are costing a fortune! Does
> anyone have experience with these in the field? Whats the failure rate
> like? Also, how quick is the transfer? In theory i should be able to
> upload a whole disk (40 GB) in a few minutes - is this true in
> practice? How fragile are they as well?
> if anyone has any experiences they could share it would be much
> appreciated.

Hi M,
I have an FS4 and some experience with it. First, I read the manual
all the way through and played with the menus, set the time, etc.
So I thought, this should be easy, and put it in "SYNC" mode with
RAW DV and off I went. Files were beautiful video, but NO SOUND would
play from my video server - oh! it requires 16 bit audio! So I set that
in the camera and voila! it works.

Two shortcomings are almost immediately apparent: (1) FS4 is FAT32 based
so file lengths are limited in size: result is about 9 minutes per file.
This is nice however if a transfer is glitched by a communications
problem, only a short clip has to be resent. (2) it has a FAN so if
you're using the on-camera mount and on-camera audio feed the FAN NOISE
can be picked up by the AGC if there is a short pause in speech!

Now I'm transferring by FTP (file transfer protocol) from FS4 firewire
(400Mbps) VIA laptop computer to 100BaseT connection to video server -
but I am only getting about 3.5+ MBps transfer (=25Mbps=DV25)!
Apparently the disk is slower than the firewire so transfer is a large
fraction of realtime.

I had hoped that capture would be a small fraction of realtime - live
and learn.

Rick

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