Confused about DTE solutions
 

Hey guys,

I did a search for the various DTE solutions on this forum but only got myself confused, and was wondering if someone could clarify this for me.

I have a JVC HD 100 camera and use Final Cut Pro (with all current patches). I was looking at getting the Focus Enhancements DR-HD100 but then realized the Citidisk was half the price. Asides from the obvious reasons to get the FE one (being able to see the time remaining, etc in the VF) I saw something about file formats that threw me off. Somewhere it said if you get the wrong file format you have to still capture the stream into FCP.

So my question is about the file formats. What file format do i want? I want to be able to copy and paste the file from the DTE drive to my hard drive on my MAC and immediately use it for editing. Also I saw some of the drives break up the data into 2 gig chunks (fat32 limitation) Is this all of the drives?

Thanks for the help guys - you rock!

Jon

Since you are a FCP user then I recommend the Focus DR-HD100.

With the current version of firmware (v2) the DR-HD100 gives you the option of recording the mpeg2 stream as a m2t (like the Citidisk) or a HDV native Quicktime.
The v2 firmware in the DR-HD100 currently limits instant quicktime conversion to 720P30, but I imagine we'll see 720P24 and 720P25 support in the future (now that Apple supports those formats.)

What this means is that you can literally plug the drive into a Mac, drag the folder of clips into your bin and start editing. If you use m2t format, then you would have to transcode all of the clips to quicktime.

The 720/24P MOV is in beta testing as we speak.