Bella Catapult: captures DV or HDV video to iPod.
 

Now, this is interesting....

http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=4598

At their website, they are quaoting a price for the device for under $300.00 !!! Available Fall !! Don't let the tape manufacturers get a hold of them.

More information is avaiable at their website:

http://www.bella-usa.com/Catapult.htm

This is different. I guess it records m2t to hard drive.

A great back up and cheap too. Compared to more than $1500 for firestore.

Assuming USB 2.0 can keep up with stream. I have had problems with some editors, using USB drives to capture to, but it also could be the editing software. This has got to be some sort of Linux OS on a chip.

I think you're right Chris, there's some sort of firmware that helps with performance along with its ability to record frame interval recording and control from the camera.

In my current workflow I capture to a USB drive raw m2t using Connect HD and then import into Avid with no performance issues.

This is really a cool littie that I could use right now.

Can you play m2t in quicktime 7?? If so, you could do dailies on a video iPod.

Note to moderator. This is pretty interesting product. I wonder if it should move to the digital disk forum alomg with the firestore solutions?

What kind of transfer rate will an iPod take and deliver. Any idea ?

I assume you are talking about viewing dailies on a plugged in monitor. Actually haven't really looked a video iPod closely, always considered it useless for video, but can it actually output to a monitor at at least DV resolution ?

I'm guessing Firestore might be getting nervous about this one. Seems like this is Firestore with freedom to use a drive of your choice.

pre and post recording capabilities tells me this device has a buffer of some kind. Which leads me to believe that it would be very easy to record footage to a hard drive.

I gather from the description that the Catapult simply looks at the iPod as another USB drive device. You might not even need a video iPod....

Yes this could affect Firestore sales except the Firestore has all of these Codecs for Avid OMF, FCP QT, Adobe Premiere AVI, DVC Pro 50 and DVC Pro HD, hence you get a lot of choices. But for HDV this is probably one of the biggest surprise today. I mean you could use a 500 Gigabyte drive and get probably 40 or More Hours of material.

If I can record video native to fcp, (i.e not m2t) I will definintly buy this thing the second it comes out.

Can it get a higher data rate stream off the camera. I know that with firewire, it has a video mode that is like 40Mb/s, but I don't know if this DV mode/resolution, or another one like 640*480. But I imagine that the USB stream it gives will be the same as the Firewire gives.


Thanks

Wayne.

Would you need to reformat your ipod for this? This would be great, but only if I could also keep some songs on my ipod and still use it for that.

Now all we need is an ultra portable firewire mic preamp that outputs in DV codec for doing location sound with our ipod as well.