High Def Hard Disk Video Recorders
I wrote a while back about the promise of external hard disk video recorders and the let down of some solutions on the market.
Fortunately, there are plenty of companies ready to embrace the challenge of delivering on the promise of digital video recording devices. Innovation lives on the heals of failure.
We put the Datavideo DN-300 and DN-400 through a workout at the Streaming Media West conference in San Jose this past week. We were filming all the keynotes and sessions from the conference. Dave and Matt both shot with Panasonic DVX 100A’s.
We put the DN-300 in one room with Dave and the DN-400 in the other room with Matt.
The main difference between the two is that the DN-400 has a swappable 250GB hard drive, which can be pulled out for another drive and the DN-300 has an internal 250GB hard drive. The DN-400 also has a headphone jack to monitor audio which, after our experiences with other devices that failed to record in critical situations, provides some peace of mind that the device is actually recording.
Dave tunes in for day three of the conference. So too does his sidekick, the DN-300.
For those who historically have shot to tape, a recording medium that is 99.9% trustworthy, it’s a leap of faith to record to digital, whether an internal P2 (Panasonic HVX) or flash memory card (Sony EX1) or an external box. Tape is like a security blanket.
Of course, shooting to tape means real time transfer. And when we’re filming 30 sessions across 3 days in two rooms, it’s painfully tedious to transfer 30 tapes before you can start to edit.
That’s why digital storage remains the holy grail, if only it always worked. Shoot, pull the footage to your desktop and start to edit within a matter of minutes or hours, depending on how much footage you shoot.
Happily, I can report that the Datavideo HN-300 and HN-400 both came through. From the Panasonic 100A’s, we went firewire into the Datavideo hard disk recorders. There are a bunch of inputs / outputs on the back (firewire, BNC, S-Video, RS-422, RCA for audio). Both recorders can shoot SD or HDV.
Mmm…Lots of Inputs and Outputs.
I pulled all the footage from the two boxes to a hard drive I picked up at the San Jose Best Buy. The recorders record .dv files, which you can pull into a Final Cut timeline. Michelle and Matt are happily editing away.
After the field workout, I gave John Stapsy from Datavideo some feedback, which Datavideo will hopefully use in their continued improvement of their external hard disk video recorders.
Basically, these things work. My main comment had to do with the peace of mind factor. Since most people are nervous recording to hard disk recorder, especially if you don’t have any back-up, such as tape, you just want to know that it’s working.
I commended Datavideo on the mini jack they provide on the DN-400 to monitor audio. The cherry on top would be a video monitor as well, even a teeny tiny one, so I can confirm that the device is reading (and recording) video. Since the recorders already have BNC outputs on the back of the box, audio AND video monitoring would provide total peace of mind.
Of course, I can always get a monitor on my own.
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. He has many fetishes. Among them is collecting business cards.
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