Ntsc/pal
 

Does anyone know why the Firestore recorders come in different standards, NTSC/PAL? Surely it's function is to write the stream of bits coming off the camera to disk. Why would this require any interaction with the content of that stream of bits other than the protocol bits (no pun intended)?

My editing software doesn't come in 2 different flavours.

TIA

Ian
Festival Video and Audio Previews - Festival Previews Ltd

Actually, your editing software deals with multiple formats. It will be selectable in the preferences.

I'm suprised the firestore drives aren't switchable dual-format (considering how much they cost) but what you have to remember, is that they are not just ordinary hard-drives (otherwise you could just use any decent HDD), they are capturing a video signal - not computer data.

thanks for the reply.

I don't think that it is right to say that the Firestore is capturing video. All that is coming out of the firewire is a digital stream of data, some of which is the encoded video - but, again, it's only a data stream and it should be irrelevant to a device like the Firestore that the data is digitised video. It's only our editing software that interprets the data on file as being video.

That said, the protocol packets of the data stream should contain all the information to allow the Firestore to be able to handle the different formats (like 720/1080 which it does) as well as NTSC/PAL (which apparently it doesn't).

Presumably I'm missing something, or is it part of the marketing of these devices?

Ian
Festival Video and Audio Previews - Festival Previews Ltd

Hi Ian,

You are right about that. the datastream is just a stream the FS records to the hard drive, its the additional info attached to the stream (start/stop/pause record, format, time code, tv standard etc) which the device "understand" in order to create clips (files) and manage them in certain firestores structure.
I was also puzzeled why a device of such cost isnt capable of doing both pal and ntsc - my understanding (as electronics engineer) is that it is mare configuration bit in the eeprom/flash which is connected to the processor inside the device.
i have two ntsc units - if i had one pal unit i would sure try reading both eeprom and flash data to see the differences and even try to interchage dumps to see how can it be changed.