I have a DVX100 and love it. I've recently been looking at purchasing a direct capture hard drive to carry along with it on shoots, possibly the ADS Pyro DV drive. Besides saving tons of capture time transferring my miniDV's to my computer, are their any other benefits to it?

If I were capturing directly to a hard drive, and not recording to a tape would the overall quality be improved? I don't have any major issues with miniDV, however I have heard that regular DV is much better. So my thinking is if it's bypassing a tape all together, it would result in fewer frame dropouts and a slightly better image.

I'm probably wrong in my thinking, but thought I would ask for a few other opinions.

Thanks!

Well, you save the cost of tape. You didn't ask but there are some disadvantages that are worth considering. First, you have no backup. With tape, it is the master and the working copy on disk can always be replaced. If you go direct to disk, make sure you make a copy before working on the master. Of course, this takes time and disk space but probably not as much time as the capture from tape would take. And you could backup to tape to save disk space but then there's no reason to go direct to disk, is there.

Another disadvantage is that you need to drag a laptop along with your video gear. And you need to power it and an external drive if you use one. There are standalone drives that can do this but they are quite expensive now.Other than tape problems like dropouts and all the other ways tape can go wrong the quality will not be improved going direct to disk. The digital stream going to tape is the same that would be going out to the disk.Your thinking isn't wrong. There's just a few more issues to consider.

Good luck.

Dennis

the last two features i've worked on, we shot with two cameras and two MCE Quickstream DVs. the immediate pluses of the quickstream are:

+takes the pain out of capturing
+allows to "review" a scene off the hard drive...if shooting to both tape and hard disk, this prevents time-code breaks and eliminates the need to cue up the tape for the next shot.

overall, that's really about it. but personally, that's enough to warrant the purchase. a few cons would be:

-increased overall size of rig
-one more thing to keep charged
-forgetting to dump the hard drive to another hard drive before shooting the next day can delay shooting

hope this info helps.

You could get DV Rack from Serious Magic and use your laptop as a hard drive recorder. It not only lets you make sure your white balance and iris is correct but also checks your audio and underscan of images so you won't be shooting objects that is not intended to be shot. There is a demo you could try at seriousmagic.com. for more information.

The Quickstream DV looks like a real winner, but boy oh boy are they making money on these things. These HDDs alone cost more than an HDD camcorder and the FIX is really in on this one. None of the HDD camcorders appear to have a Firewire connection. PLEASE correct me if I am wrong.

I shoot with a PD150 and don't want to use my camcorder as a capture deck. This preclude me from shooting in DVCAM. If you are shooting with 100 series Panasonic you are in the same boat with DVCPRO. A proper capture deck is $1500. The HDs are about half and will let you capture in either high end format. However, they are still very expensive.

Keep your eyes open for a lower cost alternative. That company or companies will do well.

HD-recording: Cheap solution

I use an 12`-Apple-G4-iBook ( 1,2 Ghz-late 2004 ) which is on par in battery-life with the dvx-battery (= CGA-D54s/5400mAh ) in life- and loading- time.

I started recording per firewire in stores (before bying a cam) for testing different cams.
( For this I used "iMovie HD 6.0.3" recording a Quicktime-stream on HD).
The app is delivered gratis with iBook and also with the actual Macbooks I think.

This streams are usable directly per drag & drop in "Final Cut Express" ( cheap-version of FinalCut Pro), but also convertible in different QuickTime-formats for exporting.

Problem is recording in full sun: I ´ve made a special foldable sun-protection-hood.
I don´t know pricing for a ready-made-version which I saw on CinetTech-trade-fair in M.

Only disadvantage of "iMovie" is a build-in time-limitation:
after 5 min. permanent recording the connection breaks and for another recording cam must be first shut off and then on.

After bying the DVX-100 in October 06 I use a new application for recording on HD:
"ScopeBox" 1.1 from Divergent media.
Not even cheap, but it has no time-limitation and shows also pro-datas in recording as audio-level-meters and many other professional graphs.

ScopeBox has little bug: After shutting off the DVX you must quit and restart the app for new recordings.

As a newbie on video I had to do many test-recordings avoiding wasted tapes.
As former S-8-filmer I like the 25 P on DVX very much.