Focus Enhancements, a company that specializes in video technology, is now making its FireStore device available through online Mac resellers such as ClubMac, MacMall, MacZone, and MacWarehouse.
FireStore converts any FireWire drive into a high performance digital disk recorder/player. With it, you can record directly to disk from a digital camcorder, VTR, or mixer. When you’re ready to edit, your clips are immediately available to your NLE system. There’s no need to capture, according to Matthew McEwen, FOCUS Enhancements Product Manager.
The US$1,000 device, announced in August, hasn’t been seen much on the Mac scene. It’s purportedly the first DV product that allows direct camera-to-hard disk recording of edit-ready DV files without the use of a computer.
“FireStore allows users to have their video clips immediately available for playback or editing,” McEwen said in announcing the product. “A video producer can go from shooting to editing in a matter of seconds. Being able to skip the capture stage of editing will significantly streamline the digital production process.”
Two identical copies of the footage can be recorded simultaneously — to disk and to the camcorder’s tape. DV streams are recorded to disk as edit-ready files that can be imported and used immediately by most DV based non-linear editing systems. FireStore is compatible with FireWire disk drives that have FAT 32 disk volumes, a file format supported by the Mac operating system.
FireStore will slave to most FireWire based DV camcorders to allow its record and record pause modes to be triggered by the press of the camcorders’ record start/stop button. Upon each record start, FireStore creates a new clip on the disk drive.
Operational functions include play, reverse play, stop, multi-speed fast forward and rewind, single frame forward and backward, next track/previous track and still record. Utility features include delete track, format disk and check disk. FireStore will also record 2-ch (16-bit, 48kHz) or 4-ch (12-bit, 32kHz) embedded DV audio.
Input and output of 25Mb/s DV sources is through a 4-pin FireWire connector while the connection between FireStore and hard disk drives is with a single 6-pin 1394 cable. To edit video clips, you can either cable their FireWire disk drive directly to your Mac or use the bypass mode, which allows the hard disk drive to mount to the computer through FireStore.