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Has anyone bought and used the CitiDISK HD?
Has anyone bought and used the CitiDISK HD? If so, what are your impressions. I talked with someone at the factory but he seemed recently arrived from China and not well acquainted with the English language yet. That being the case I did not get good answers to my questions (nice enough guy, though). Their website is also obviously written by someone for whom English is a 2nd language and also is not very specific about the capabilities of the machine. I think he told me it doesn’t start recording when you hit the rec button on the camera but then again I think he did say it did… I just don’t know. The phone call left me with more questions than answers…
Brian FitzGerald
FitzVideo.com -
3 Replies
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Hi Brian,
While I have not used the CitiDisk, form what I understand is that it only records a quickTime stream and thus the footage would only be available if you were working on FCP.
Hope that helps,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Thanks for the reply.
Brian FitzGerald
FitzVideo.com -
Obviously Panasonic is supporting the Firestore, but I’m surprised you have not tried the Citidisk given that loads of people will be looking at them because they’re cheaper.
Of course, neither option is anything like perfect yet. What we really need with the 200 is to dump the tape drive and replace it with a swappable dual HDD (i.e. so it records to two drives at once, negating the need for the tedious backing-up) and for the internal drives to be cheap-enough to treat and archive as tape.
I’m a documentary-maker who can shoot 3-4 hours of footage a day, so P2 cards totally not an option. The Firestore is great, but expensive, meaning we can only afford a few and we have to lay off and back-up footage as we go. The 200 is going to appeal to small documentary teams like us (indeed, we’ve bought one and chose it over the 900 for it’s nimbleness). But the backing-up process, which will have to be done in the evening after a long day shooting on location, is a big chore at the very time I’d rather be in the bar with a large drink. Given the need to back-up, for safety, to two sources, it’s not even much quicker than digitising from tape – and almost certainly necessitates an assistant which adds extra cost (particularly if we’re moving from location to location) and a big nervousness factor. (Can I really trust original rushes to hired help?)
At the moment, the decision is to back-up each Firestore to two 100Gb mobile drives (Lacie/G-Tech) which can be split up into two different cases for air travel. Taking in hand luggage – something we could do with tape rushes – is unlikely to be an option, especially with the current security issues.
Jemima
http://www.passionateproductions.co.uk
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