iPod Dreams

Once
again we are deeply indebted to our quirky and inspirational readership
– on at least three counts.  First, for responding
to our online inquiry in such numbers and with such conviction.  We
have never gotten 12 comments on a single posting, even if three of them
were our own. Second, for actually answering our question and providing
us with easy-to-understand explanations for why we can’t now and will
never be able to record live video on our iPod, as well as a truly helpful explanation of why we are
a retarded dick-head. And finally, for giving us an opportunity to post
our final iPod cheesecake photo, at least until we can recruit another willing
model.

Of all the illuminating comments the one that told us
the most was the shortest. The inestimable Steve Garfield brought to
our attention the FireStore
FS-4; a tiny hand-held miniature hard drive
designed specifically for direct live video capture.

This sweet piece of technology sports a 80 GB, high
speed hardrive which can hold up to 6 hours of high-quality video. It
converts the data stream on the fly and records to its disk in a variety
of file formats including .avi and Quicktime.

Unfortunately, it lists for $800, and the is no word
on the web site as to whether it can play our mp3 files as well. Seeing
as we just dropped $400 on a new iPod, it will be a while before we are
recording our digital video directly onto a FS-4, or anywhere else, apparently.
The iPod harddrive IS, categorically, too slow to do the job.  Here
is a first
hand report from someone who has tried various configurations:

I tried using my iPod as a capture disk (after temporarily wiping all
music tracks from my iPod) I was greatly underwhelmed: it does NOT
do the job!

Disks for use with Digital Video must write at a minimum of 3.6MB per second
for sustained transfer of video between a camcorder and storage disk. That equates
to roughly 1GB storage for every 5 minutes of video. The FireWire interface (theoretical
speed up to 50MB per second) easily handles 3.6MB of data transfer, but not all
hard disks can receive and store data at that rate.

Capturing DV onto my G3 500MHz FireWire PowerBook’s internal Toshiba 20GB hard
disk has never been a problem (nor capturing video onto my external ‘backup’
20GB LaCie hard drive). But, my iPod captures about 7 seconds of video, then
there’s a glitch and the PowerBook screen goes black for a couple of seconds,
and then capture resumes. But two seconds of video is lost.

I ran the latest Norton SystemWorks 2.0 "System Info" disk-speed
check on my internal hard drive, on my 5GB iPod, on the external 7200 rpm LaCie
drive,
and on an external Western Digital 5400 rpm 20GB drive.

"And the winner is!" …my internal hard drive! The iPod’s transfer
rate is w-a-y too slow for video editing and the other two disks never matched
the speed of my internal drive! (though I had just defragmented the spare space
on the internal disk, so that influenced things a tad!).

The internal PowerBook Toshiba hard disc – according to Norton – writes a 1k
file at 2594k/sec (just under the DV speed of 3.6mb/sec), does a 4k sequential
write at 8133k/sec (that’s 8mb/sec), and a 16k sequential write at 15248k/sec
(that’s 15mb per second, far more than fast enough) – whereas my iPod writes
a 1k file at 505k/sec (far too slow), 4k at 1971k/sec (still too slow), and 16k
at 5520k/sec (that’s 5.5mb/sec which is OK).

The iPod writes at anywhere from a fifth the speed to about one third the speed
of my internal hard disk. But it keeps up, above that crucial 3.6MB/sec speed
only for short bursts of file-writing, and doesn’t reliably capture more than
about 7 seconds before it’s overloaded. (from iPodlounge)

On the other hand, the FS-4 captures and saves in an
editable format, at least putting to rest the claim that physical size
or firewire limitations made it impossible to do what we want; capture
audio and video to a small, portable storage device.  Just not the
iPod.  The following is from the FS-4 web page:

Tapeless acquisition is quickly being accepted as the
standard in broadcast production. Now everyone can make capturing a thing
of the past with FS-4 or FS-4 Pro. Record directly from your camcorder
while you shoot using Direct To Edit (DTE) Technology. When you are finished
shooting, connect FS-4 to your computer and you are instantly ready to
edit in the timeline! No capturing, no file transfer, no file conversion.
Just shoot, then edit!

No matter which DV NLE system you have, FireStore FS-4 has you covered.
On FS-4, files are recorded to disk as RawDV, AVI Type 1, AVI Type 2,
AVI Type 2 24p, Matrox AVI, Canopus AVI, QuickTime or QuickTime 24p.
The FS-4 Pro model also includes MXF, Pinnacle AVI and Avid DV-OMF support.

Thanks to all who took the time to contribute