DV to Disk without a laptop ?
 

I know there are products such as the Firestore, but is there a way to capture video to an external drive from a camera? I am on a really tight budget of course :P

Hi Travis,

Which Cam will you be using, and do you want to record directly to a DVD ???

Harold

I will be using a Sony TRV900 and I would like to record directly to a hard drive.

Just wondering if there are any cheaper devices like the MCE quickstream.

anyone???.........anyone???.....................Beuller???

Sorry, but I think you might be out of luck for anything hard-drive related below $1500. I think it would be pretty cool if there was a way to modify one of these external firewire drives like a Western Digital Mybook to utilize battery power and hook it up to your camera, but it might be a little more complicated than that. I'd be curious to learn if there's anything out there myself, so best of luck to you!

Yeah thats exactly what I was thinking (about using a external) but wasn't sure if anyone has done the before.

I don't understand either.
There is software that can do it.
There is hardware that can do it.
But nobody can put it together for under $1,500?

Actually you can get into a Firestore for less, but if you need HD space it's pricey -- which is another curious thing, as HD space is dirt cheap anymore. I just wonder if something political is going on that's holding it back.

EXACTLY!! I know there are some sharp people on this board that could come up with something. I'm doing my fair share of research and will let you know what i find, if anything.

You're paying the higher price for a few reasons. These inexpensive external drives you pick up at Best Buy or CompUSA are meant to be plugged in to a wall and spend their days sitting indoors on a desk. The hard drives these enclosures contain are the same hard drives you can buy to mount internally further down the aisle. They're not designed to perform in the environment that a professional videographer is often exposed to.

I would never even dream of lugging a book-sized WD Mybook around outside with a camera. The consumer grade hard-drives aren't meant to be jostled around and exposed to varying temperatures. Even if you bought a $100 little 80GB portable hdd and were able to get to work- if you drop it, you're out of luck. Especially if you're out in the middle of nowhere with no backup. The risk of losing the footage is so high that your savings could be negated by a ticked off client- or worse.

Now, these Firestore drives and Sony's DR60 are designed specifically to be used out in the field under all sorts of nasty conditions. Sony's drive is encased inside a rubber housing crammed with sensors and protective measures so that in the event you do drop it or knock it against something, your footage is well-protected. You're paying for the reliability and alleged quality of the drive so that you can have peace of mind when you go off on a shoot. You'll have a piece of equipment that can stand up to varying types of weather and abuse again and again, hopefully for quite some time longer than what it takes to pay for itself.

The only time I could see an inexpensive consumer grade external hard drive being handy for a shoot is if you're in a studio shooting under controlled conditions directly to the hard drive. I could also see bringing a large external hard drive out into the field so you have a place to dump all the footage you shot on your Firestore/DR60/etc...

Just my 2 cents.

Oh yeah I understand completely, but I am not a videographer and will be shooting in controlled environments, mainly inside locations. I'm still on the hunt but would love for someone to shed some light on how to get this running. Hell even if i have to plug it into a drop cord or something thats still ok, as long as i have just that to carry with the camera.

Recently I've been trying to come up with some designs to use with my cameras. I have 2 Sony TRV900's that the heads and pickups are damaged on. I use them as a deck via firewire to two laptops. So I'd like to design something to carry me (dolly and steady cam) and the camera with the laptop attached, or better.....an external drive.

I agree, Shawn, but I think the WD externals are pretty tough. I dropped one off a table onto tile and it worked fine afterward. Maybe I'm lucky. Certainly I'm a clutz.

Are you kidding ? The drives used in these devices are the same old plain one you can purchase for 100$ in any computer shop.
Neither sony or firestore are building hard disk for they own use.
The previous sony DSR-DU1 is just using standard hitachi drive.
If you mean that the packaging make the difference, it is expensive to pay 1000$ for some rubber stuff.
There is another simple explanation.
Volume sale.....
the day you will find a taiwanese company selling massively a firewire to sata/ide adapter, price will drop. (the last company (remember the catapult ?)who tried , failed).

Such a product is not just a drive in a case - you need some sort of operating system to make it work. An eprom to boot from. Basically, a low production volume computer in a case.

Of course Sony is being supplied hard drives from another manufacturer. It would most likely cost much more if they had to go through the trouble of developing their own- and I agree with you that these particular items carry a heftier price for the additional reason that there's not a huge market for them. Of course, if everyone in the world wanted shock-resistant battery-powered firewire drives, they would undoubtedly be a great deal less expensive.

The Sony DSR-DU1 is also quite a bit different from their HDR-DR60 model- at least from what I've read about it. The DR60 has sensors inside its rubber casing that detect when the drive is falling. When those sensors are tripped, the drive immediately retracts its heads to prevent damage to the platters. This drive also has a 14-second buffer to help prevent further data loss in the event of an accident. Those $100 Hitachi/WD/Maxtor/etc. drives in your local electronics retailer would be well over $100 if they offered that same amount of data protection. Then there is the point that Seth brought up about having a built in operating system. You're paying for an incredibly small package DR60 is 8 oz.) that can not only stand up to some of the abuses of Mother Nature, but it can also communicate back and forth with the camera and with your computer system. Those aren't the only issues, but I think its enough to get my point across. Make no mistake: These "special" drives are extremely expensive! But they do have features and benefits that consumer level drives don't.

Also, Dana, I'm glad your WD drive still works! I think those 1TB Mybook drives are awesome, and I'm itching to get one to store my extraneous files and projects.

that is the problem with electronics devices.
when you take the raw price of each element, it hardly sums to the sale price of the device.
The problem doing this kind of calculation is you forget the salary of people designing, selling, building, supporting the product, plus the price of investment (building rental, travels, copyrights and licenses...)
Imagine that some customer would you pay a wedding shoot only few dollars, arguing that this is the price he can get for a DV tape in a supermarket ?

So, if somebody is smart enough to put a 100$ 500gig drive on a 20$ chip, running a free version of some linux OS, and be nice enough to share this for free, yes there is an hope.
But if you are like me, if i would build such marvel and know it is a valuable thing than many people wants, there are chances you will try to get rich by selling it NOT for cheap.

Easy: just buy yourself the cheapest laptop you can find with a firewire port and then get any inexpensive editing program which can capture a live signal from the camera via firewire. (This assumes your camera has a live output from its firewire port.) That's probably not much cheaper than buying a Firestore drive, but you get a free laptop as part of the deal.

This sounds like a good idea, but those cheap laptops make me cringe... Most low-end laptops have incredibly slow processors that would probably choke just from pointing a camera at it! They're also loaded with minuscule amounts of memory that's shared for video processing. On top of all that, the hard drive you would record on will most likely be a dismal 4200rpm drive. You might get lucky with a 5400rpm drive for a few bucks more, but even those are kind of iffy when it comes to ingesting video. In the end, you would probably find yourself spending about a thousand bucks on a laptop. If you're going to spend that much it wouldn't be that big of a deal to tack on a couple hundred dollars more and get the Firestore or something similar. At least then you'll know what you're getting in to!

Another 2 cents in the cup...

It is possible to do this for well under $500. The processor can be as lowly as a 400MHz Pentium III. That is exactly what my thread "Homemade Direct-to-Disc on the cheap" is all about. I used an old tablet which was much harder to set up than a laptop would be. The important things would be the RAM (256MB minimum) and a good battery because you'll be replacing the hard drive with a larger capacity model anyway. Remember DV takes about 13GB of space per hour.

I've captured at over a terabyte of video (70+ sporting events) using my tablet. I won't go back to tape alone, although I still run tape as a backup. The ease of creating DVD's directly from the tablet hard drive over a network is very handy.

The latest version of Ubuntu was extremely easy to set up. If you're familiar with setting up windows software, you could do this in few hours. As a matter of fact, I'm posting this from a Ubuntu box. But don't think that I'm one of the Linux zealots as I spend way more time in the Windows world.

I'll be glad to answer any questions anyone has if they want to do this.

David

I'd use an old Tablet PC, or an touch screen UMPC. Put it in a bump case where you have access to the screen, that way you can wear it over your shoulder, tethered to your Cam in your hand.

Kind of reminds me of old school "portable" camcorders with the tape transport in a shoulder pack, and camera tethered to it.

-Ed