Is there a digital recording deck that can record video to a hard drive in QuickTime or other compressed formats, rather than storing it as raw DV25 video?
Is there a digital recording deck that can record video to a hard drive in QuickTime or other compressed formats rather than storing it as raw DV25 video?
Check out Fast Forward Video, which offers multiple hard drive-based video recorders. In particular, its DigiDeck unit comes in single- or double-drive versions for recording one or two channels of audio and video with a single unit.
The DigiDeck can be configured to record and store video as Motion JPEG in QuickTime format using compression rates that range as high as 20 to 1, which allows storage of as much as 12 hours of video on a 40GB drive.
Unfortunately, the DigiDeck provides no network connectivity, but rather uses swappable disk drives that can be moved to an internal drive bay or external USB or FireWire drive chassis connected to a PC so you can copy video clips for postprocessing.
Copying 40GB of QuickTime clips from the DigiDeck is faster than digitizing as many as 12 one-hour DV tapes, but you give up having those DV tapes as backup copies, and you give up ever recovering the original DV25-quality video.
The video quality captured by the DigiDeck at the lower compression rates is comparable to DVD video, which is quite respectable. Depending on your plans for the digitized video, you may find the compromises involved with capturing QuickTime clips to hard disk acceptable.
