Focus Enhancements FireStore FS-4
 

Has anyone used the FS-4 product with wildlife videography ?

I would appreciate hearing of ones expierences in the outdoor enviornment and its durabilty.

Thanks,
Tom

Tom,

Over on the XLH1 forum, Micheal Devlin was raving about using it. I'll try to post a link

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=65115

Firestore
 

We have used the Firestore with the XLH1 outdoors on a boat in rough seas. No problems. We use the hot shoe mount kit to put it right on the camera and shoot both handheld and tripod. The hot shoe mount kit restricts you to the smaller (standard) battery size which is unfortunate. You can also use it with a belt clip (or clipped to the tripod) and a slightly longer firewire cable.

Note that a standard rain cover does not fit when the Firestore is mounted on the shoe, so some improvisation is required when it gets nasty (or again the belt clip works).

We have dropped the Firestore (not overboard though!), banged it around, and occasionally connected it up incorrectly. But it keeps on ticking.

While we tested the FS-4 at 24F, we have really only used it in 60i for actual shooting. It seems to work well with Avid. We just connect to the laptop (which mounts the Firestore as a drive) and then import the files into Avid as native HDV or DNxHD.

Advantages of Firestore
 

Mike,

Why the FS over tape? I assume it's because the FS works as a external drive when capturing.

Can it capture HD? While recording to tape? Is there a difference in image quality from FS to Tape?

Thanks,

Ken

FS-4 HD/Pro HD
 

Ken,

Yes it can capture in HD. As an .m2t file. You have to purchase either the HD version of the Pro HD version or if you already have one then there is a HD upgrade. Not sure what the upgrade costs, so it may be cheaper to buy the non HD and have it upgraded.

Hi Ken, Scott is right. We use the HDV version of the FS-4 and all we do is HD. I never tried tape (just not a tape kinda guy being from the software world) so I can't comment on the relative quality. We just use the FireStore to capture and then immediately transfer to a computer or laptop with RAID storage.

About 70% of the time we are actually capturing the HDSDI into Avid (to DNxHD 220mbps 10-bit). Works great if you are near a well-rigged boat or vehicle (or studio), not so well if you are backpacking. We only use the Firestore (or the optical disc on the F350) when the situation requires untethered operation (without cables or computers).

We are relatively new to this business and still learning (which is why DVInfo is so cool), so you should take that into account in considering our experience. I would not claim to be an expert, but I must say we have had only good results with the FireStore.

too me when shooting it makes more sense to use tapes, recently I went on a trip and shot 10 hours of footage at a time. Yes a firestore is huge but still I like having no limit on how much I can shoot.

Also Im using a Mac based editing studio and they dont like m2t files, and I dont wanna waste time converting everything.