ProVideo Coalition.com: Bruce's Blog by Bruce A. Johnson

Y’know, I’m getting very quickly sold on using flash memory for a recording medium. My experiences testing the Sony EX-1 and EX-3 cameras have really made me a believer. Problem is, I already have a raft of cameras (Canon XL-series, mostly) that I still love and still make great pictures. And in the current economy, pouring over $12K into an EX3 and wide angle lens just isn’t going to happen too soon. What to do?

Focus Enhancements has been hitting the ball out of the park with hard drive recorders for several years now, and the big brains there have just made another leap. Enter the FS-H200, which at first glance looks like an FS-5 hard disc recorder. However, when you turn it on it’s side, you will find a Compact Flash slot instead of an internal hard drive. Using HV and HDV’s 13-gigs-per-hour data rate, it’s an easy calculation that a 16Gb compact flash card will record over an hour of footage, and a 32Gb over 2 hours. (Of course, CF cards are still much more expensive than an equivalent DV/HDV tape, but if you have ever had a tape dropout spoil your edit, you can easily see that double-recording with CF and tape is a very inexpensive insurance policy, and one that can drastically speed up your workflow to boot.)

Other features of the FS-H200 include silent operation (no moving parts!), a long-lasting removable internal battery, and native recording in many codecs and wrappers including AVI type 1 and 2, Quicktime, RawDV, M2T, and the Canopus and Matrox AVI formats. And while the FS-H200 looks a lot like the FS-5, it doesn’t share some of the FS-5’s coolest features, like video on the monitor screen or remote logging via WiFi (with an iPod Touch or a laptop.) Still, at a list price of $1195, it is a good bit less expensive than the FS-5. (I recently upgraded my FS-5 to the new 2.0 software - watch for a review of that soon.)

I hope to have an FS-H200 in hand to test soon. The units should be shipping this month, so check out www.focusinfo.com and watch your favorite retailer for the chance to bring your trusty old tape-based camcorders into the brave new world of solid-state recording!

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Too bad it’s only using an HDV codec.

The Aja Ki Pro and the Convergent Design Nanoflash have better codecs. But they are more expensive…

There should be a way for Focus to make a recorder with an MPEG2 I-frame codec.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/02 at 02:32 PM

“Too bad it’s only using an HDV codec.” The H200 doesn’t have a codec on board, it’s a bit-bucket for whatever comes across FireWire. If the camera sends DV, the H200 records DV; it it sends HDV, then HDV gets recorded.

The nanoFLASH has a Sony MPEG-2 codec on board, so it does its own compression—but now you need a camera with HD-SDI outputs (and rather a bit more than $1200 burning a hole in your pocket, too) so you have a clean baseband signal to compress. If it connected using FireWire I/O, it couldn’t do any better than the compression already present in the signal, even if it decompressed it and recompressed it to a higher bitrate.

The same arguments apply to the Ki Pro (though the Ki Pro will accept baseband analog component or S-Video as well).

Focus could do the same, but then they’d wind up with the same cost and same I/O requirements as the other two. Different tools for different needs; all are useful in their own ways.

Posted by Adam Wilt on 06/03 at 01:11 AM

Yeah! What Adam said! <g>

Seriously, there are a lot more cameras out there with an HDV port than an HD-SDI port, so it makes sense for Focus to aim for the biggest target, while keeping the price in a reasonable range.

BAJ

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/03 at 08:39 AM

Yes, you’re right. I forgot about the firewire/SDI difference.

I wonder if, in the near future, we will be buying camcorders in different parts, one sensor here, one recorder there, and glue everything together to suit our needs.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/03 at 08:45 AM

I’ve already had something like this from Sony since November. It goes on the shoe, connects via Firewire, works great. Why does Focus get all the glory?

Posted by cpelham on 06/03 at 11:48 PM

Yeah, Sony’s now selling the HVR-MRC1 CF card recorder as a standalone product: $820. Not too shabby, eh?

Posted by Adam Wilt on 06/04 at 12:03 AM

Yup. I’ve been using the MRC1 CF recorder on my Z7U for a year now. HDV’s a bummer, but the workflow is fantastic and CF is so much cheaper than SxS.

Posted by Jay Friesen on 06/05 at 12:53 PM

What about Avid Support. The FS-5 specifically touts Avid “With the FS-5, you can record native MXF HDV 720p 30 and 1080i 50/60 clips and import them into Avid Xpress Pro, Avid media composer, or Avid Newscutter for editing.”

The Sony, obviously, does not. But the FS-H200? The web site is mum.
http://www.focusinfo.com/fsh200.asp

Posted by IEBA on 06/23 at 01:30 PM

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