Firestore FS-4
The FS-4 can help you streamline your workflow in a variety of ways. For instance, a lot of people will take advantage of the DTE(direct to edit) capability of this unit, which means that it looks and acts just like another hard drive, when plugged into your editing system via the firewire port. Since you don't have to capture the video footage from tape, you can start editing right away. The video clips appear on your computer as long filenames in front of the .avi, .dv, .mov, etc., suffix that reflects whatever format you chose to record your video clips in. Focus Enhancements has done a good job of covering the gamut of digital formats, but with the FS-4 you don't have much control over how the clips are named. Take a look at the FS-4 Pro if you need better video clip management.
The alternative workflow would be to copy all of the video files over from the FS-4 directly to a hard drive on your editing system. Since your typical editing hard drive spins at 7200 rpm, you'll be able to access the data faster when editing, because the laptop hard drive in the firestore is spinning at only 5400 rpm. You'll also be backing up all of your video data, which is important if you recorded it using the tapeless mode. The copy process is much quicker than the real-time video capture that you'd normally do off of DV videotape. Recording in tapeless mode is the reason that this author purchased the FS-4, because it stops wear and tear on the video heads. Canon charges nearly $400 to replace the heads on an XL1s, so this unit will pay for itself in the long run, especially if the shooting you do requires putting the camera in pause mode a lot. Shooting surfing, for example, is a good way to wear out a video camera before it's time.
When recording with a video camera that has external DV device control, you should be able to see when the FS-4 is going from "STOP" into "RECORD" mode, because it tells you exactly that in the camera viewfinder. That feedback is very reassuring, because if the firewire cable ever became accidentally disconnected, for instance, it should show up immediately as "DV IF". In normal operation, the camera gets booted up first, after which the Firestore FS-4 takes approximately 12 seconds from a cold boot until it's ready to record. You can press the standby button on the XL1s at the same time that you turn on the FS-4, and you'll be in sync and ready to go.
One thing that you'll want to do is to spend time learning the menu system of the FS-4, because some things are not quite as intuitive as they could be, and the manual doesn't help much. For instance, you would have thought that the Retro Cache feature was available when shooting in the tapeless mode. However, the CONTROLTYPE "E" tapeless mode(page 54) can only be accessed when the Retro Cache is de-selected, and Normal mode is selected(page 31). You won't find that information in the manual. Note that the standard FS-4 is supposed to have a fixed 6-second Retro Cache, while the FS-4 Pro has additional options for things like altering the length of the Retro Cache.
The FS-4 has two Firewire ports. One of them appears to use a variant of the Oxford 911 chipset to interface between the FS-4 hard drive and the editing computer, similar to how an external hard drive case plugs into the firewire port of your pc or Mac. The other firewire port on the FS-4 is apparently controlled by a Phillips chip that allows for things like device control to be included with the DV datastream. That is what your video camera plugs into, and in a perfect world, you could also use that port to plug the FS-4 into your computer, where it's operation could be controlled by the computer. As you'll see in the next section of this review, there is a big advantage to having that capability, because you could then capture video from it just like it was a DV tape deck, among other things. As it stands now, Windows XP won't install the FS-4 because there is no device driver available for it. The Phillips chip most likely does have that capability, and in fact device drivers have already been written for it for other applications, but there probably wasn't enough ROI to justify it for the FS-4.
That is not to demean what has been accomplished with the FS-4. This is a very sophisticated piece of gear, and it's head and shoulders above the Quickstream DV recorder that was tested by this author. There is a lot of trick surface mount technology engineered into the circuit boards of the FS-4, and the inclusion of the fan inside this unit shows that Focus Enhancements went the extra mile to make it live a long life. The price point of the FS-4 has dropped, and it is well established in both video and computer retail channels.
4-Channel Audio with the FS-4
The hard drive inside the FS-4 is formatted with the FAT32 system, which means that the maximum file size is 2 gigabytes. When the 2gb limit is reached, the FS-4 will seamlessly start another new video clip, without missing a frame. It will also create new clips every time that you put the camera in pause, which is another way of saying that it automatically gives you some degree of scene detection. The DV standard allows you to have either 2-channel audio recording at 48khz, or 4-channel audio recording at 32khz, period. The FS-4 menu will let you choose the one you want, and it will simultaneously record the exact same digital data that is put on the DV tape. However, when you capture DV footage off of tape, most(all?) capture utilities leave one pair of audio channels inside of the captured avi file, and put the second pair of audio channels into a seperate .wave audio file. DV files with stereo(2-channel) audio is the main format that DV-based editing systems work with, so there will most likely be a problem when the editing software is presented with an FS-4 file that has all 4 audio channels included in it.
For instance, Sony Vegas 5 saw the 4-channel DV avi file as a 2-channel 32khz file. Canopus Edius 3 includes a project preset for a 4-channel DV avi, but it only recognized the first pair of audio channels in the avi file. Media players appear to have the same limitations, as both the Windows Media player and the Quicktime player would only play back the first pair of audio tracks. Change the format from an avi to a raw dv(.dv/.dif) format, though, and Quicktime will at least play all four audio channels at once, even if it still thinks that there are only two channels of audio.
So one way to handle 4-channel audio with the FS-4 is to first record in the raw dv format, then use the Firestore DV converter software to extract the second pair of audio tracks from the FS-4 over to your local editing hard drive. Unfortunately, depending on your editing software, you may have to convert the raw dv file over to another format as well, because you only want the first pair of audio tracks in the file to be audible. The second pair of audio tracks should still be inside of the converted file, but you'll most likely be unable to prove it, since there isn't much software out there that is capable of seeing a second pair of audio tracks in a type2 avi file. The FS-4 should play all four audio tracks back, of course, if you copied the converted file back to the FS-4 and played it back into your camcorder.
Right about now you might be wondering why you can't just record 4-channel audio in the type2 avi format with the FS-4, and use the DV converter software to extract the second pair of audio tracks, without having to use the raw dv format. If you do get that to work, please let the world know how you did it. Fwiw, since the lossless file conversion process is very fast, it's kind of a moot point anyway for those of you who want to copy the video files over to your main hard drive for editing. So why are there all of these audio issues with the type2 avi format that everyone is using? Long story short, it apparently records one of the audio track pairs inside of the video data stream(?), and Microsoft did not fully support accessing it until recently. The next question is why Quicktime won't let you manipulate all 4 of the audio tracks, when they are in the raw dv format that it supports.
Type2 avi files with 4 channels of audio are not something that most people work with, so CodecTest.com has put downloadable clips on the web that you can check out for testing purposes. The second pair of audio channels in the avi clip has music in it, as confirmed by playback from the FS-4 out to the Canon XL1s, but good luck being able to actually hear the music. There is also a Quicktime raw dv clip that you can download. You'll hear all 4 audio channels playing back in the Quicktime player, but the goal is to see if you can manipulate the audio tracks individually within your editing system. These are both zip files, about 24mb & 13mb respectively:
The second page of this review covers the CodecTest.com prototype
