Firewire Drives
 

So what's the difference with a 'regular' fire wire drive and the ones that companies are selling just like the Firestore and the other ones? I mean you can buy a 250gig hard drive for a little bit of nothing but you have to pay big $$ for the DTE types. Am I missing something here? Is there a reason to not use these types? Thanks!

They have small self-contained enclosures, battery power, and smart circuitry to know what and when to record as well as the ability to wrap the video as QT or AVI, play individual clips, etc. etc.

A regular firewire drive is just a dumb storage device.

Well this may be a 'dumb' question (it wouldn't be my first) but can a regular firewire drive work? Sorry to be so lame in my questions...just trying to save a few bucks. As everyone on here knows that when something is used professionally or has the work professional on it you usually get screwed on prices. And most of the time there is a reason for the high price but sometimes its a facade.

I really enjoy this forum and appreciate everyones knowledge and willingness to participate!

Unfortunately a regular firewire won't. By dumb storage device I meant it didn't have the components to be "smart". No dumb questions here!

If you are using Premiere and AspectHD in a laptop (I do this all the time), you can use the capture mode (F5) to capture the footage using the firewire from the camera to an external HD through the laptop.

The connections are as follows:
1. you connect an external HD (firewire or USB 2.0) to the laptop,
2. you connect your camera to the computer through the firewire
3. press F5 within Premiere and set the external HD as the path
4. hit the record on the capture screen of Premiere (and in the camera if you are using tape as back-up)
5. you have your clips already in your HD!

It is really simple. Basically, you are using your laptop as the "smart" component offered by the DTE systems, without paying for it...

Hope this help,
Luis Otero

What seems like a decent option due to price and size to the DR-HD100 is the Citidisk HDV. It doesn't have a display so that can be a problem unless you are mostly just shooting one mode each time you take out the camera since I hear it is annoying to set what codec you want. Someone is posting a review of it soon.