Teased By The Promise Of An Electronic Device
There are some products that, if they actually work as advertised, offer so much promise. You smile just thinking about the possibilities and the sheer joy they could bring to your life.
The Firestore by Focus Enhancements is one such product. After first reading about the Firestore I said something along the lines of, “My God, this solves so many problems.”
A quick run down of the features and benefits that got me hot and bothered in the first place:
- external 100GB hard drive that connects to a Panasonic HVX via firewire
- you can shoot to the Firestore in real time and store in multiple formats (.mov, .avi, p2n)
- instead of having to pull miniDV tapes in real time to your desktop, with the Firestore, as soon as you’re done shooting, you just pull the digital files to your desktop and you’re ready to edit…literally a few minutes after connecting the drive to the computer.
That’s the promise.
The reality is that using the Firestore is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. The odds that it actually works as promised are as good as the odds that something goes disastrously wrong. That would be 50/50 odds…great odds if we’re measuring the percentage of girls who say yes to a date or other such questions a guy may pose to a girl, bad for a device you need to rely on.
After having experienced disaster after disaster, I can now put Firestore disasters into into two categories.
Category one I experienced pretty much from day one. When you hit record and the status icon goes from the square stop to the two vertical dashes record/pause to the circle record BUT the counter that tells you how much record time is left doesn’t start counting, then something is wrong. Assuming that the universal record circle means it’s recording is, well, a wrong assumption.
At least by now, after multiple experiences, I always look for the counter to start in addition to the icon changing to the circle. I am a trained Firestore operator. So as much as it sucks that it doesn’t work, at least I know BEFORE shooting that I should record to tape and call it a day. Of course, that is after a few restarts of the Firestore and camera to see if I can get it to work.
But recently I was confronted with a new kind of disaster. Let’s call it a category two disaster.
This category two disaster happened not on one Firestore, but two - the FS-100 and the newer 160GB version we bought last month.
The counter started going so I thought it was recording. After a full day of shooting I connected the Firestore to my computer to pull the footage to my desktop and begin editing. When the drive mounted, I could even see all the files. But when I tried to open one of the .mov files I was confronted with a “sorry, file not recognized” type of message.
So there are about 60 - 70GB of files that are absolutely useless to me. And 7 tapes staring me in the face, taunting me, “ha ha…you have to pull each and every one of us, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, tape by tape…all in real time, while the paint dries.”
Unfortunately, when we called Focus Enhancements tech support, they chalked our problems up to our own retardation. Apologies to anyone who is retarded for the non-PC word choice.
I even shot an email to Focus Enhancements PR person, who I met at NAB, and asked if she could connect me with someone so I could talk to them instead of sending an email to “support” and getting lost in the shuffle.
Her response:
Hi Peter,
It’s good to hear from you. I hope the show went well for you. In regards to your query, my suggestion would be for you to call the support line at: 763-398-1658.
Kindest regards,
~Lisa
>hi lisa,
we met @ NAB. you’re going to send us the new field recorder to review when it is ready. can you connect me to someone in the tech department @ Focus? we have 2 firestores. in general, they hold all the promise in the world but constantly frustrate us when we most need them to work. we have an issue on 2 firestores that i wanted to talk to
someone about.thanks,
peter
ScribeMedia.org
Well that’s helpful. I’ll remember that when writing my article.
Firestore disasters can follow the hurricane system. I guess a category 3 disaster would be if I was recording HD and only counted on the Firestore instead of having some sort of back-up recording option (like tape or a P2 card). No way to salvage my shoot whatsoever.
Given our Firestore experience, I asked the ScribeMedia team to each write their most memorable Firestore disaster moment, and to put it into a hurricane disaster category (one, two or three). In the spirit of user generated content, feel free to chime in with your own Firestore war stories.
Hopefully, Focus Enhancements will respond to me this time and offer more than the non-toll-free phone number to call.
My challenge to Focus Enhancements is to not become the next Diamond Rio. Remember them? The first company to come out with an mp3 player, only to rest on their laurels and be lapped by the likes of Apple with the iPod. Or will Focus Enhancements step up and continue to innovate on the great idea they tried to create a solution for?
Currently, the Firestore is the only real choice in the market for external field video recording devices. But knowing the market opportunity, others will step up. In fact, in the next month or two, both Focus Enhancements and Roland will send us new field recording devices to review that will hopefully deliver on the promise. We met with both companies at NAB.
In the words of Elvis, hopefully this time around I’ll get “A little less conversation, a little more action.”
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. He has many fetishes. Among them is collecting business cards.
The Firestore is the Yugo of camera devices.
I have been a firestore victim on so many occasions that I patently loathe the device, even so far as to advise people I shoot for to just sell the damn thing to some poor schmuck on ebay and either invest the dough in a reliable (but expensive) P2 card, or just buy the very reliable Sony PMW-EX1 and a bunch of longlasting super fast SxS cards.
Firestore burned me day one when I was shilling the thing at NAB 2006 for B&H - I sold the promise to HUNDREDS of customers there (we took a fair amount of orders for the device at the B&H booth) - SO many of those customers returned their units and then sent me emails cursing my children (which I thankfully don’t have yet) that I felt like a turd. The problem there: Panasonic was the one telling me that the thing worked - and I was so in love with the HVX 200 that I wanted to believe them. I bought the camera, bought a P2 card, and quit B&H to go back to filmmaking ? and avoided buying a Firestore based on cost. Thanks by the way, Panasonic, for screwing your early adopters by NOT giving them P2 cards - I learned my lesson then about buying new gear from you - wait till sales slump and THEN consider the product. I got away with a $500 4GB P2 card and an old G4 laptop for almost a year before I had to use a Firestore. That thing is a headache. I know cameras, computers, and programming quite well, and it gives ME a headache. I can only imagine what its like for someone who just wants to shoot their material and do their work without having to call tech support (its sooo Microsoft 1998 that way). Maybe Roland will be the Apple to Focus’s Microsoft? Let’s hope!
So, through experience with the Firestore FS100, I became so frustrated that I formulated the following theory: I naively believed that the unit would deliver on all of the promises they claimed, after all, the production of a drive unit with a circuit board, battery system, and a little bit of machine level programming isn’t rocket surgery. Its something that any one of thousands of people here in the good old US of A could readily assemble given a spare couple of weekends and the firewire protocols from Panasonic (Firestore’s partner in the endeavor). I believe Panasonic chose this group not for their track record of success, but for their excessively obtuse approach to technology. This gives Panasonic the ability to point to a partner and say “they are filling that gap” but still have plenty of P2 sales because the damned thing sucks - and I have talked with hundreds of Firestore users and only met one that was satisfied with it - and he is a gear fetishist that just collects the stuff - never actually uses it for anything (you know who you are, McBride).
Also, the design of the thing is about as unfriendly and unwieldy a device as you can imagine. How come a 160GB iPod that can play video is sooooo much smaller? Don’t give me that “heat dispersion” crap.
Oh, and Firestore? Your tech support sucks. And Firestore, if you doubt that, I will post the tech support thread here for all to read. Trust me, I am doing you a favor by leaving that off.
I view the Firestore product offering as nothing less than a vast conspiracy between Panasonic and Focus Enhancements to drive people to P2 cards in their exorbitantly overpriced state. You know what? It worked. We bought a 32GB P2 card before NAB. And you know what? It worked. Lots of great footage on the RED camera (I think they thought our HVX camera was “a cute toy”) and Roland’s devices, coming in two days.
~Drew
Amen.
I have a firestore, and I have similar problems. I have been back and forth with them so much with tech support, and they treat me like I’m a complete fool, and don’t know how the product should work. (Which is to say “At all.”)
I have butchered weddings, concerts, and all manner of events that P2 cards just won’t cut it as a one man operation. That “Invalid Movie File” thing is soul crushing. I peg it at One in Twenty files, just totally unreadable. “PLEASE WAIT” indeed.
Oh what I wouldn’t give to be part of a class action lawsuit.
Phil
I’ve never had any issues with the Firestore. Shooting DVCProHD, DVCPro50 and DV. Not one problem. In P2 and .mov formats. Shoot it, organize it, transfer it, edit it.
Not one problem. That was with an HVX. Guess I am just lucky.