Shining Technology, a company that specializes in data storage solutions for digital consumer products, launched the CitiDISK DV, a plug-and-play FireWire storage solution, at this week’s Macworld Conference & Expo in New York City.
The battery-equipped CitiDISK DV offers portability and direct recording DV streams from camcorder to hard disks and instant playback from a Mac. All of the DV streams are recorded and organized as computer-recognizable files, and users can instantly play back, edit, review and archive files. What’s more, its hard disk has an IEEE 1394 standard that acts as a regular FireWire for data storage when not being used in multimedia applications.
With CitiDISK DV, users can cut, paste or add special effects and other functions immediately, without re-capturing, according to Chris Wang, Shining’s U.S. marketing manager. The computer reads in the DV stream as 66 MBs/sec (ATA66), which is four times faster than capturing the data from a camcorder. DV streams are recorded in a pre-formatted HFS+ or FAT32 computer-recognizable file.
In addition, users can save final rendered video streams into CitiDISK DV in the same speed, which is four times faster than backing up to a FireWire tape deck, Wang said. Key applications for the product include online capture for home video camcorder and digital video cassette player archive, computer data file backup and archive, Web video capture, and multimedia.
The CitiDISK is currently available through retail outlets, as well as being sold to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Pricing ranges from US$499 (a 20 GB model) to $649 (40GB), depending on options.