The Firestore Revolution
Oh, Firestore… How I hate thee.
Our director of sales and marketing, Peter Cerveiri, tells me this all the time… “Jason, what can we do to make the turn around on this project faster?”
“If we shoot in High-Def we can pull the footage from SxS cards” I usually say…
“All our High-Def cameras are tasked elsewhere… What about using the firestore?”
It’s at this point that I usually cringe.
In theory the firestore is a wonderful thing. A small poratble hard drive, capable of capturing real-time in .mov format (or a variety of others you may choose instead).
This, of course, negates entirely the time consuming problem of capturing tape after tape of material. Instead of siting through each and every one of your captured events again in real time, you simply plug in the device, download it’s content (at maximum drive capacity this usually takes 20-30 minutes) and you have all of your content, ready to be edited.
That’s assuming of course, that the device actually works.
ScribeMedia is the unproud owners of three (3) fire-stores.
Two FS-100 HD’s, and one FS-4 (the standard definition model).
In this past week all three models have gone down, and all of them, it appears is due to actual drive issues rather then an outside issue (faulty firewire cable, camera problem, troubled computer, etc.)
The most recent (and last of the three to fail) decided to die at a conference where turn-around time is nothing short of imperative.
Let me quickly frame this for you: 3 days of shooting, almost 15 hours worth of footage in total, and five days to delivery a slickly edited product.
Thinking that firestore would be there to save my butt and ultimately cut my post production time in half, I plugged the device in for the first session and all I heard from the internal hard drive was a lovely *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*…
You can imagine my happiness…
This is also not the first time we’ve had issues with the firestores, nor is it the first time we’ve posted a rant about it.
But this time, with a little bit of luck, we will do the sensible thing by picking up our three firestores, turning towards the office window, and seeing what they look like when they hit the ground from four-stories up (a-la David Letterman).
My question is, why do companies feel that they can get away with producing inferior products that continue to break and rarely work the way they are supposed to? And why do we, the general public, still continue to buy these things that we know, deep down, will ultimately fail us and just completely suck?
I invite the rest of you who have had similar firestore disasters to post your experiences here. I also hope you will join us in the anti-firestore revolution, and our quest to discover a superior product for quicktime capture, that actually WORKS!
Viva la revolution!
Jason Kichline is ScribeMedia's project manager. He likes typos, fast food and MacGyver like solutions to life's nagging problems.
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