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.”
